

The Future of Medicine Is Now - tarunmitra
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323530404578205692226506324.html

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betterunix
Routine gene sequencing sounds like a nightmare to me, more on the level of
some dystopian Gattaca than a medical miracle. If those devices are not open
to scrutiny, if independent reviewers cannot guarantee that genomic
information will remain secure and will _never_ leave the device, then they
should not be trusted and patients should refuse to be sequenced. Even then,
we would have questions -- could a school sequence every student's DNA, and
have these devices check for markers associated with "undesirable" ethnic
groups (perhaps by claiming that those markers are correlated with poor
academic performance, just so they can pretend to be a meritocratic system)?

We have already had a glimpse of the darker side of gene sequencing:

[http://www.nature.com/news/genome-test-slammed-for-
assessing...](http://www.nature.com/news/genome-test-slammed-for-assessing-
racial-purity-1.10809)

