genomeboy.com

Jason chimes in in the comments section of the previous post on the potential value of knowing one’s genotype:

…there are many reasons why someone might want to learn about predisposition to disease, even when therapies are not available, including disease advocacy (i.e. joining a “race for a cure”), or in the specific case of Alzheimer’s, behavioral modifications like the avoidance of contact sports.

To me the judgmental browbeating from the medical community would be comical if it were about anything other than disease. Medical geneticists have been in the business of–in the immortal words of Steve Murphy–”diagnose and adios” for the better part of a century. I wonder how many medical professionals ever, in good conscience, said to the dysmorphologists of yesteryear, “Why even bother trying to understand this syndrome? There’s nothing you can do for this family.” Okay sure, one could argue that dysmorphology and medical genetics are ex post facto pursuits–the unfortunate event has already happened and hey, we need a box to put it in so we can say we did something and at least tell families what we know.

But if we accept the “can’t do anything to change it” argument and the idea that genomes are fixed, then why is it okay to examine something retrospectively but verboten to see what might lie ahead? Because someone might get depressed? Because we have to save people from themselves? Blogga please. When people ask me whether I’m nervous about getting my DNA sequenced, my response is always the same: “Maybe I will feel differently in a month or a year, but for right now  my genome is the least of my problems.”