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13,000 Volunteer To Put Personal Genomes Online
Lucas123 writes "The Personal Genome Project, which opened itself up to the public on April 25, has to date signed up 13,000 of the target 100,000 volunteers needed to create the world's first publicly accessible genome database. Volunteers will go through a battery of written tests and then offer DNA samples from which their genetic code will be derived and then published to help scientists discover links between genes and hereditary traits. While the Personal Genome Project won't publish names, just about everything else will be made public, including photos and complete medical histories. Scientists hope to some day have millions of genomes in the database."
I was surfing The Hun and accidentally put some of my genome on my keyboard.
Thank goodness for Purell and Kleenex.
Is there a similar project for KayDE?
its a bit late,
google images already says there are 286,000 pictures of gnomes already online.
http://images.google.co.uk/images?q=garden%20gnome Results 1 - 20 of about 286,000
liqbase
Just who is going to control these kinds of databases and prevent the misuse of the data? Once a condition or a hereditary pre-disposition is determined, a subject could be denied medical coverage for that condition. It may well be anonymous today, but that can not be guaranteed into the future.
Am I the only one who read: 13,000 Volunteer To Put Personal Gnomes Online ??
Imagine an army of garden gnomes.. Well, I for one! Oh, forget it.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
It's quite the logical extension of the project after all! Finally we can have a REAL gnome interface!
Putting your genetic composition online is pretty much uhm... identifying yourself.
Given a name and an entire frickin gene sequence... I'd more quickly rely on the latter for identifying an individual.
Who knows... maybe at some point there will be software that can generate a speculative image of a person baed on the data in genes.
Didn't the alien conspiracy already do this?
Without gathering a significant number of genomes, how could anyone identify which illnesses are hereditary, much less try to find a cure?
I'm willing to bet that in the next 30 years we will have "personal drugs" tailored to a specific genome made by a desktop machine.
And insurance companies start to tag you according to your DNA/vulnerability score. Watch what happens when they will be able determine that you have Alzheimer's related genes in your DNA.
The X and Y chromosomes that make up a genome.
Believe it or not, X and Y chromosomes aren't the only ingredients...
While the Personal Genome Project won't publish names, just about everything else will be made public [...]
Why do we need the names? Just take the genome data and use it to concoct an unholy abomination, mocking the laws of God and man, making a soulless clone of the person in question, rousing the populace to chase you down with torches and pitchforks in an attempt to stop pure genius their pitifully small minds could never truly understand, and just ASK what his/her name is?
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
... the make-up of J Craig Venter's genome, as he used himself for human DNA in the first draft. It doesn't seem to have hurt him too much to have that information out.
Although indeed if the US would at least catch up to 1960's era Europe and institute universal single-payer health care, I would be much quicker to volunteer for this. Unfortunately as others have pointed out there is abundant opportunity for our for-profit insurance companies to abuse this information to make our lives more difficult (and more expensive to boot).
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Although I love GATTACA, that film had a faulty reasoning.
Assuming a science so advanced people could be programmed from conception to have six fingers and become superb pianists, the same technology level would allow people to correct their genetic shortcomings. For instance, we already have Lasik to correct imperfect eyesight such as the protagonist in the film had.
Technology works both ways, if it's so advanced it lets someone find genetic "imperfections" it can also be used to mask them.
The discoverer of the structure of DNA was the 3rd person fully sequenced. 20 of his genes appear in the bad gene database (@5000 entries). None of these have been expressed yet at his ripe old age of 80+.
Sergey Brin is worries about finding a Parkison's gene in his genome. But he doesnt need to be overly worried.
And in other news, Apple and others are mainstreaming the use of software to recognize faces, so the omission of names from the database is really a laughable gesture towards privacy. These folks are taking a risk, for sure. But hey, no risk, no rewards. I applaud them.
Currently hooked on AMP
Ok, as a person who has done DNA tests for himself and believes in the value for people working together on this, I believe this is just terrible.
People value their privacy, and for DNA research to make progress, they need as many people involved as possible, which has not been done yet. Less than 0.0000001% of the world has had their DNA tested. So, for that to be able to be done, their privacy needs to be ensured. People, being concerned about identity theft, use of their own information for negative purposes, etc, run for the hills when being brought about DNA tests today because they believe it's the ultimate in risk for that, to do such testing.
So, the geniuses doing this want to enhance their fears by playing right into it, by exposing everything about themselves as part of this?
For ALL MANKIND, it is best to get into a method of keeping high security over DNA testing, revealing absolutely nothing to anyone who they don't approve of (normally specific scientists, researchers and doctors) so that we can start testing as many people as possible with every genetically-related condition on the planet, so we can find ways to prevent and eliminate them fully.
This is about as wrong as possible, in light of that.
TFA states they need one byte per base pair resulting in 6 gigabytes per subject.
My guess is there is a huge sequences of duplicates so compressions could probably bring this number down quite a bit.
Also, since a byte can store 256 distinct values would it be able to handle more then just one base pair.
Isn't the plural of "volunteer", "volunteers"?
Scientists look at his DNA, just to admire a job well done.
How many people must be sequenced until there is enough genetic coverage to interpolate?
I mean, I have a certain genetic code, and I share a good deal of that genetic code with my mother and father, right? And my siblings and I have similarities as well, I assume.
Using similar methods to those that we use for DNA testing of maternity or paternity, how many people in a given group must have their genes sequenced before you could, say, have a 50% chance of getting a match on a given bloodstain or fingernail at a crime scene (or get something close enough that a court would allow the police to go fishing for more DNA, do interviews, etc...)?
If the answer is "all of them," then perhaps genetic sequencing is relatively innocuous to us as a whole. Individuals can make the choice to be sequenced and it can be their exercise of Free Will to do so. But if the answer is "only a small percentage," then that means that these individual actions of persons today could have far-reaching consequences for generations of people to come.
Having control over one's own actions and own body has been an important right in many cultures; how strange it would be for us to have propelled science to a point that our personal actions could have such a devastating effect on our progeny and relatives, essentially robbing them of a piece of their personal privacy by giving up some of our own.
coding is life
...they will come alive to mine zikspot in the torture mines the evil lord emperor Zarguf runs on the planet zzebildiz!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
It seems like the initial human genome sequencing took several years, ending back in 2003 or thereabouts. Just how fast is the process nowadays? I trust, if they plan to sequence DNA from tens of thousands of individuals, it must be multiple orders of magnitude faster than what the original sequencing took????
Life is tough. Life is even tougher when you're stupid.
I've never had such conflicting diametrically-opposed thoughts then that I fully agree with the project, and think of how many great things this project has the potential to produce.
Possibly a cure for cancer.
Perhaps a flawless man-machine interface
(Recursion alert) A flawless man-machine interface and the potentials for both extreme good and extreme evil. But in that case, for a certain percentage of these people, there may be generations of my descendants cursing my act. With a perfect man-machine interface, and a public copy of my DNA, bad bio-hacks could be done by nefarious individuals to me and my descendants. (But then, the "noise" induced into the DNA by each generation of reproduction that "mixes down" the individuality of the "original copy" (aka, me) would make it nearly impossible to gain any "hacking" advantage.)
But on the other side, the knowledge we'd gain by "datamining" 0.1 Megapeople would be tremendous - it could cure cancer/aging/disease and the idea of "immortal till killed" would have to be considered.
I must consider this...
It doesn't bother me much, so I volunteered.
snig
I hope mine's an astronaut!