Personal Genomics in the Classroom: Students Sequence Themselves
By Monya Baker,
Nature News Blog
| 10. 11. 2012
Medical and graduate students will get the chance to sequence and interpret their own genomes in what is being billed as the first-ever course to offer whole-genome sequencing.
Mount Sinai Medical School in New York is offering an elective course called ‘Practical Analysis of Your Personal Genome’ this year. The goal is to teach upcoming physicians how sequencing information might affect clinical care.
Students can choose to sequence their own or an anonymous genome. This will reveal several million variants, many with known implications for disease and health, and many more with unclear significance. Students may learn their risk for common diseases such as cancer or diabetes and also whether they carry mutations that could cause single-gene disorders in their children.
Mount Sinai will also use questionnaires to find out whether students opting to analyse their own genomes know more about sequencing and how they feel about the utility and psychological impact of whole-genome sequencing. The 20-person class comprises graduate and medical students as well as junior faculty, the school said in an
announcement.
Students analysing their own blood...
Related Articles
By Pallab Gosh and Gwyndaf Hughes, BBC News | 06.26.2025
Work has begun on a controversial project to create the building blocks of human life from scratch, in what is believed to be a world first.
The research has been taboo until now because of concerns it could lead to...
Since the “CRISPR babies” scandal in 2018, no additional genetically modified babies are known to have been born. Now several techno-enthusiastic billionaires are setting up privately funded companies to genetically edit human embryos, with the explicit intention of creating genetically modified children.
Heritable genome editing remains prohibited by policies in the overwhelming majority of countries that have any relevant policy, and by a binding European treaty. Support for keeping it legally off limits is widespread, including among scientists...
By Ron Leuty, San Francisco Business Times | 06.16.2025
23andMe's two-step sale to a nonprofit led by former CEO Anne Wojcicki is nothing more than a dance around California's genetic privacy law, state Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a filing late Monday, one day before a judge will...
By Ed Cara, Gizmodo | 06.22.2025
In late May, several scientific organizations, including the International Society for Cell and Gene Therapy (ISCT), banded together to call for a 10-year moratorium on using CRISPR and related technologies to pursue human heritable germline editing. The declaration also outlined...