Craig Venter's Genome

J Craig Venter became famous by founding Celera Genomics which competed against the government in sequencing the human genome. The race to sequence the human genome is quite an interesting story; Celera was a for-profit business firm that wanted to license out the sequence, while the government wanted to make it open source. Venter designed several novel and brilliant ways of speeding up the sequencing. Interestingly, his DNA was one of the samples that they sequenced. He recently published his genome in PLoS Biology. I wanted to write a few thoughts about that.

This is pretty unique. His genome is the first genome of a single identifiable individual to be published. He makes public a lot of information about himself. Indeed, people have already identified that he has a higher risk of earwax, antisocial behavior, Alzheimer's, and cardiovascular disease. His life is now an open book, and scientists are using his data to find out more about his biology. What is it like, I wonder, to find out you have a polymorphism that predisposes you to some disease? What is it like for it to be public knowledge? It's also one of those things where people find only bad things; the majority of people are looking for SNPs for disease and not ones for good hair or memory or intelligence. This seems like a very risky thing. It's really a novel and strange ethical issue.