Private eyes
NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Large amounts of aggregate human DNA data that the National Institutes of Health and other groups made open to researchers around the world is being locked up from public view due to privacy concerns that arose this week when a new forensic DNA method was announced that could conceivably leave people vulnerable to identification.
So that’s it? After all the elaborate mechanisms put in place for investigator applications, data submission, data access, data monitoring, data oversight, and governance…now we just pull the plug on sharing of GWAS data because it can’t be protected?
I work as an Assistant Professor in the Duke University Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy (although this site and its content are my own).
In 2007 I became the fourth subject in Harvard geneticist George Church's Personal Genome Project. As the PGP moves forward, I am chronicling the dawn of personal genomics, that is, people obtaining their genomic information for whatever reason(s) and figuring out what to do with it. I am interested in the relevant technologies and especially the attendant privacy and other ethical/legal/social issues.
This blog may also discuss some of my non-genome interests or, to paraphrase Dwight Yoakam, "Guitars, Cadillacs, hillbilly music, etc etc."
The header image comes from the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange's multimedia performance piece, "Ferocious Beauty: Genome."