Because you were dying to know
What’s the story behind your blog’s name?When I told a friend I was getting my genome sequenced, she said, “Why you? What makes you so special, Genome Boy?” I thought that was funny.
What do you think the greatest challenges will be for individuals in the future, as the technology makes accessing personal genomes more affordable?
There will be many. One will be logistical: How do we manage all of this data about ourselves? Another will be learning to think probabilistically: What does it mean to have a 35 percent lifetime risk of Type 2 diabetes? This gets at a larger question: How do we retrain ourselves not to view genes as destiny? They’re clearly not - we are incredibly complex creatures affected by thousands of genes and an infinite number of environmental stimuli. But that’s a hard sell, and as a consequence, genes have been marketed as destiny. We have to get beyond that.
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."