Why Whole-Genome Testing Hurts More Than it Helps

President Obama proposes to plunk down $215 million on "precision medicine," and the National Institutes of Health and its National Cancer Institute will spend it by sequencing the whole genome of a million or more Americans.

Is whole-genome testing the path to health? The short answer is no.

The main problem with the proposal is that the research is bound to produce more noise than signal. The issue isn't genetics but "big" data. The basic idea of precision medicine is to look for patterns in the genome that seem to travel with problems we all care about: diabetes, heart disease, cancer and dementia. But there are a lot of possible patterns to look for.

Imagine there were only 10 data points in a person's genome and that each point could only take on one of two values: red or green. The first could be red or green, the second red or green and so forth. The number of possible patterns that could emerge from those 10 data points is 2 to the 10th power — 1,024 patterns...