Genome Sequencing: Who Gets to Use the Data?

Misha Angrist, assistant professor at the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy, says the biggest “bottleneck” within the industry is interpretation. “With 23andMe, the FDA said you cannot tell people what this genetic information means for their health,” he says. “You can tell them about their ancestry or a gene that may make their pee smell funny if they eat asparagus, but you may not go into detail about what this means. So the question becomes, who gets to interpret this?” Angrist says giving this information to parents makes sense, but cautions that introducing genome scans on a mass clinical scale within the next five years would inundate the medical world and consumers since they will provide too much information on too wide of a playing field. Read more.