Scientists Hope To Attract Millions To "DNA.LAND" (nature.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Started by computational geneticist Yaniv Erlich, and geneticist Joseph Pickrell at the New York Genome Center and Columbia University in New York, DNA.Land is a project which hopes to create a crowdsourced DNA database for genetic studies. Nature reports: "The project, DNA.LAND, aims to entice people who have already had their genomes analyzed by consumer genetics companies to share that data, allowing DNA.LAND geneticists to study the information. Although some consumer genetic-testing companies share data with researchers, they provide only aggregate information about their customers, not individual genomes. Because the data are not always accompanied by detailed information on patients' health, they are of limited use for drawing links between genes and disease."

Comments

Death by stoning

[Anonymous Coward]

Among other things, next-generation DNA sequencing is the ultimate paternity test. There's enough information to determine a person's entire family tree out to many generations. But there are still countries where adultery is punished severely (e.g. death by stoning). I'm a big believer in allowing people to get their genomes sequenced and to freely share information that would allow them to interpret their genomes (i.e. freedom of speech). But those of us who have grown up in modern "western" cultures are going to have to understand that there are other cultures that do things very differently.

Re:No way I'd agree to give away private data

[Anonymous Coward]

But imagine someone near death. The privacy issues wouldn't be so pronounced in that case. It would be kind of like saying you want to posthumously donate your organs.

Or heck if it were possible to sequence people who are already dead, someone could just save us all the trouble and dig up some old graves of people who died before mickey mouse. That stuff has got to already be public domain.

They can have mine

[behrooz0az]

They can get my DNA from my cold, dead hands.
Very seriously, They can take it when I'm dead. Privacy won't matter to me then and the data is still useful for them. probably even more useful because they now have a cause of death which means more data.
They should really consider this. Probably some sign-up process like they do for organ donors.