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Stanford University School of Medicine today said that it will offer a new course that gives medical and graduate students an option to study their personal genotype data.

The university said that it believes it is the first medical school to offer students such a course. However, the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine offered its fourth-year medical students a similar course in personalized medicine this past year.

In the Stanford course, students will learn how to analyze, evaluate, and interpret the genetic data, the limitations of existing technologies, and the legal and ethical issues surrounding personal genotyping.

The course will be an elective and will be offered during the school's summer quarter, which begins June 21.

The UPenn course also included a discussion of the ethical, legal, and social implications of personalized medicine, according to Professor Reed Pyeritz, who offered the course and is director of the school's Center for the Integration of Genetic Healthcare Technologies. Students in the UPenn course were offered an option to have their genome scanned by the Coriell Personalized Medicine Collaborative.

Recently, the University...