In the capital of digital sharing and over-sharing, Silicon Valley, contributing one’s whole genome to science in the name of fun and self-knowledge has never felt that controversial. Engineers share software code liberally every day on sites like GitHub and Bitbucket. Plenty of those same coders and their investors gleefully joined 23andMe spit parties back in the heady days before the Federal Trade Commission jumped in with a call to sanity. Silicon Valley is still over-sharing. Someone is literally live-streaming their walk from a train station to a bar on Twitter’s new Periscope app as I write. Superficially, it seems...

U.S. and British government agencies are moving toward enabling what would be the first clinical trials of what is, in effect, human germline engineering – genetic modifications that would be passed down through the generations. The modifications would not be made to nuclear DNA. Instead, the procedure being considered is oocyte modification – creating an egg cell with the nuclear DNA of one woman and the mitochondrial DNA of another. The goal would be to allow women with mitochondrial diseases to have babies that share their nuclear DNA, but are not at risk of inheriting their mitochondrial disease. The UK...

“Once you obtain your genetic information, the knowledge is irrevocable,” warn the service terms at saliva-testing firm 23andMe.com. The news wasn’t so bad, except for Alzheimer’s. Also, I’m sort of related to Stephen Colbert. Of course, 23andMe, of Mountain View, Calif., can’t predict your medical future with certainty, but, using a saliva sample, does uncover a wealth of personalized data on predisposal to diseases – more than 240 health conditions and more than 40 inherited illnesses – along with likely drug responses and ancestry details that go back thousands of years. Here’s the process: You sign up online and pay...

Privacy concerns related to DNA sequencing got yet another airing today when a team from the Whitehead Institute reported in Science that using only publicly available information, they have been able to identify about 50 men who had anonymously donated DNA to projects such as the Thousand Genomes Project. While research subjects and sperm donors by and large want anonymity, others use DNA to find their relatives on the Internet, on sites like Y Search and the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation. In other words, there is plenty of DNA out there that has an identity attached to it. And if...

With the 2012 BIO International Convention behind us and the Fourth of July signaling summer vacation season in earnest, thoughts turn to visions of sun, sand and afternoons lounging in a deck chair. Again this year, BioWorld polled biotech execs, industry analysts and our own staff to construct a diverse list of titles for your reading pleasure. Whether your tastes run to historical intrigue or the classics, professional development or science fiction, you’ll find something of interest on our sixth annual list. Fiction: 16th Century England to 20th Century Los Angeles Diego Miralles, head of Janssen West Coast Research Center...

Reading last weekend’s Wall Street Journal review of “The Forever Fix: Gene Therapy and the Boy Who Saved It” I was struck by an anecdote. It’s about an interview the reviewer did with a scientist who works in the field of neuroprostheses, and that scientist’s refusal to talk about the possible practical applications of his work, because, he said, “false hope is a sinful thing.” Really? To me, it seems like an inevitable part of hope is that it might be false. To illustrate, I don’t hope that my neighbors will be nice to me, because it’s a sure thing....

MONTREAL ‑ At this week’s American Society for Human Genetics annual meeting, where there is a whole genome sequence there is somebody bringing up privacy concerns. Do you really want your genome data to be laid bare? Will it start in a research database, move to your doctor’s office, and soon enough be found floating around on the Internet? Most of those privacy concerns focus on medical issues, which makes a lot of sense. Certainly, most people would not feel warm and fuzzy about having their insurance companies know that, like Craig Venter, they have a higher-than-average risk of developing...