With Consumer Genetic Testing, Buyer Beware

THE ERA OF direct-to-consumer genetic testing means that anyone can pay $99, spit into a plastic vial, and get back a detailed readout on ancestry and risk factors for scores of diseases. At the forefront of this wave is Silicon Valley startup 23andMe, which has collected the DNA of 700,000 members since it was founded in 2006. This flood of data, however, raises a host of ethical questions that neither testing firms nor their customers may anticipate — especially when unwanted information invades customers’ lives.

The Food and Drug Administration moved last year to protect DNA testing consumers from being bombarded with alarming warnings and hard-to-interpret risk assessments about their health that might give rise to unnecessary procedures. Still, the company can provide consumers with the raw data, allowing them to find experts to interpret it for them. That’s a fair compromise: Americans should be able to obtain information about their genetic background; testing firms should be able to present that information with a minimum of hype.

Another source of controversy is 23andMe’s growing genetic database. As...