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How To Check Yourself For Abnormal Genes
AnneWoahHickey writes "While the State of California was harassing personalized genomics companies, and hindering the development of personalized medicine, Wired was preparing a guide to genetic testing. It explains how to make sense of the massive sets of raw data offered by 23andMe or deCODEme, and a way to check yourself for genetic abnormalities that are not covered by microarray tests. Facing a medical community that is fiercely resistant to change, the fate of personalized medicine is truly in the hands of consumers."
"Facing a medical community that is fiercely resistant to change..." really? Thats a bold claim to make especially considering the amount of medical research that happens in this country.
Services like those mentioned in TFA may be able to provide information on which genetic variants a person carries, but will not interpret those results. Non-scientists, and even scientists seem to over estimate the ability of modern genetics to assign meaning to common genetic variation. Your average M.D. when confronted with a print out of a patients 'mutations' would be completely unable to make heads or tails of them. There are few instances such as cystic fibrosis, where the etiology is well known, and known mutations WILL cause disease. In other cases such as BRCA in breast cancer, 'mutations' are risk factors for disease. In the vast majority of cases, modern genetics has no idea what a 'mutation' at rs39842093 might actually do. These services are expensive, ambiguous, and require a certain measure of vanity on the part of the consumer. If you have a family history of disease X, there may be a small number of 'mutations' for which you might be tested that could actually impact your future health, and those services are provided by someone other than 23andMe. Biology is a bit different than technology in that observing that biology works does not imply that someone knows how it works. (Creationists can bite me.)