Consumer DNA Testing May Be the Biggest Health Scam of the Decade
By Ed Cara,
Gizmodo
| 11. 20. 2019
At the start of this decade, the federal government called out consumer DNA testing as a burgeoning scam industry. Little did we know how it would explode in popularity.
In 2010, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) published an investigative report that bashed consumer DNA test companies for misleading the public. It accused them of deceptively claiming their products could predict the odds of developing more than a dozen medical conditions; some even went as far to offer equally dubious dietary supplements. The report had followed a similar lambasting of the industry by the GAO in 2006.
Also in 2010, the FDA publicly warned 23andMe and other companies that genetic health tests were considered medical devices and needed to be cleared by the FDA before they could be sold to the public. Three years later, following a lack of response from 23andMe, the agency took the harsh step of temporarily banning 23andMe from selling its health-related tests at all.
Despite these hurdles, the DNA testing industry has nonetheless exploded. According to a report by MIT Technology Review this February, more...
Related Articles
Not the species, certainly, but the Institute of that name, which was founded by transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2005 as a research group at Oxford University. According to a recently posted Final Report, its goal was “to pursue the big questions in a transdisciplinary way” by pulling together “researchers from disciplines such as philosophy, computer science, mathematics, and economics.” This evolved before long into the study and promotion of “effective altruism” and “longtermism” as...
By Tristan Manalac, BioSpace | 04.02.2024
Verve Therapeutics has suspended enrollment in the Phase Ib Heart-1 study evaluating its lead gene editing program VERVE-101 following a serious adverse event, the company announced Tuesday.
A patient, who received a 0.45-mg/kg dose of VERVE-101, developed a grade 3...
By Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres, First Monday | 04.14.2024
The stated goal of many organizations in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), an imagined system with more intelligence than anything we have ever seen. Without seriously questioning whether such a system can...
By Harold Brubaker, The Philadelphia Inquirer | 04.04.2024
Acompany started by University of Pennsylvania scientist Jim Wilson has received FDA approval to test a form of gene editing in infants for the first time in the United States, the company said Thursday.
The Plymouth Meeting company, iECURE, is...