From Volunteers, a DNA Database

Abigail Wark wants to see your areolas. But only if you are a participant in the Personal Genome Project, a research effort to find 100,000 volunteers as research subjects in the public domain — contributing data from their genomes, microbiomes, health records, tissues and more. The project comprises 16 research groups that want to study different aspects of the data. Scientists from each group are meeting on Tuesday in Boston with a group of 150 volunteers whom the project’s executive director, Jason Bobe, calls “omic astronauts,” from the “ome” in words like genome. This is the fifth annual GET conference; the initials stand for genomes, environments and traits. Read more.