Your Double Helix Or Mine?

Of all the geeky things in the world that fascinate me, I think I've found the one that takes the top spot...right after my husband. It's called the Personal Genome Project, and I think it is long overdue. It seems simple enough - publish the complete genomes and medical records of several volunteers, in order to enable research into personalized medicine - and its effectiveness may come to bear only decades from now. However, I think asking people to participate in something like this will help medicine break free from the sort of stagnation that has plagued it for so long, and move forward Watson and Crick's vision for humanity.

Wired Magazine published an article that takes a look at the project, and its founder George Church. Here's a small excerpt from the article:

If your genome is the blueprint of your genetic potential written across 6 billion base pairs of DNA, your phenome is the resulting edifice, how you actually turn out after the environment has had its say, influencing which genes get expressed and which traits repressed. Imagine that we could collect complete sets of data — genotype and phenotype — for a whole population. You would very quickly begin to see meaningful and powerful correlations between particular genetic sequences and particular physical characteristics, from height and hair color to disease risk and personality.

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...the PGP will also put Church's expertise in synthetic biology to use, reverse engineering volunteers' skin cells into stem cells that could help diagnose and treat disease. If the convergence comes off as planned, the PGP will bring personal genomics to fruition and our genomes will unfold before us like road maps: We will peruse our DNA like we plan a trip, scanning it for possible detours (a predisposition for disease) or historical markers (a compelling ancestry).

My only worry is that the $1000 fee for registering may greatly narrow the pool of participants to a class of wealthy volunteers from limited races and countries. It could also skew the data they collect in terms of the actual health of those participating one way or another, particularly if they are looking at phenotypes.

There is, of course, enormous political, moral, legal and religious baggage that a project like this would carry for people, the most realistic of them possibly mirroring the situation in the movie Gattaca, where racial or religious discrimination is replaced by genetic discrimination. I am therefore skeptical of this being the panacea for humankind, but if it helps even somewhat, I am in favour of it.