DNA Testing Is a Slippery Slope
By Russell Saunders,
The Daily Beast
| 04. 14. 2015
Untitled Document
Let’s say you have a whole lot of money.
Let’s say you have so much money that, even after you’ve purchased a basketball team and a chain of movie theaters, you still have enough cash left over to invest in a maverick approach to your own health care. Should you sink an unspecified sum into ordering every test you can find in the off chance that sooner or later you’re going to detect something valuable?
Mark Cuban says “yes.”
In a series of tweets posted at the beginning of this month, the media baron and basketball franchisee admonished his followers that, if they were sufficiently affluent, they should order blood tests for “everything available” on a quarterly basis in order to establish a baseline for their own health. In the event of some deviation from the any given person’s aggregate normal values, it might detect some abnormality earlier than it would otherwise be found when it started creating symptoms.
Looking at Cuban’s page now, it seems the tweets in question from April 1 have gone missing. But...
Related Articles
By Annika Inampudi, Science | 07.10.2025
Before a baby in the United States reaches a few days old, doctors will run biochemical tests on a few drops of their blood to catch certain genetic diseases that need immediate care to prevent brain damage or other serious...
By Geoffrey A. Fowler, The Washington Post | 07.17.2025
Nearly 2 million people protected their privacy by deleting their DNA from 23andMe after it declared bankruptcy in March. Now it’s back with the same person in charge — and I still don’t trust it.
Nor do the attorneys general...
By Elizabeth Dwoskin and Yeganeh Torbati, The Washington Post | 07.16.2025
A group of well-heeled, 30-something women sat down to dinner last spring at a table set with pregnancy-friendly mocktails and orchids, ready to hear a talk about how to optimize their offspring.
Noor Siddiqui, the founder of an embryo-screening start-up...
By Suzanne O'Sullivan, New Scientist | 07.09.2025
Rare diseases are often hard to spot. They can evade detection until irreversible organ damage or disability has already set in. Last month, in the hope of preventing just this type of harm, the UK’s health secretary, Wes Streeting, announced...