With Consumer Genetic Testing, Buyer Beware
By Editorial,
The Boston Globe
| 09. 30. 2014
Untitled Document
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...
Related Articles
By Megan Molteni and Anil Oza, STAT | 10.07.2025
For two years, a panel of scientific experts, clinicians, and patient advocates had been hammering out ways to increase community engagement in National Institutes of Health-funded science. When they presented their road map to the NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya last...
Paula Amato & Shoukhrat Mitalipov
[OHSU News/Christine Torres Hicks]
On September 30th, a team of 21 scientists from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) published a significant paper in Nature Communications, with a scientifically accurate but, to many, somewhat abstruse headline:
Induction of experimental cell division to generate cells with reduced chromosome ploidy
The lead authors were Shoukhrat Mitalipov, recently described here as “a push-the-envelope biologist,” and his long-term colleague Paula Amato. (Recall that in July the pair had co-published with...
By Pam Belluck, The New York Times | 10.17.2025
Before dawn on a March morning, Doug Whitney walked into a medical center 2,000 miles from home, about to transform from a mild-mannered, bespectacled retiree into a superhuman research subject.
First, a doctor inserted a needle into his back to...
By Julia Black, MIT Technology Review | 10.16.2025
Consider, if you will, the translucent blob in the eye of a microscope: a human blastocyst, the biological specimen that emerges just five days or so after a fateful encounter between egg and sperm. This bundle of cells, about the size of...
