Why Whole-Genome Testing Hurts More Than it Helps
By H. Gilbert Welch and Wylie Burke,
Los Angeles Times
| 04. 27. 2015
Untitled Document
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...
Related Articles
By Emily Glazer, Katherine Long, Amy Dockser Marcus, The Wall Street Journal | 11.08.2025
For months, a small company in San Francisco has been pursuing a secretive project: the birth of a genetically engineered baby.
Backed by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and his husband, along with Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong, the startup—called...
By Jessica Hamzelou, MIT Technology Review | 11.07.2025
This week, we heard that Tom Brady had his dog cloned. The former quarterback revealed that his Junie is actually a clone of Lua, a pit bull mix that died in 2023.
Brady’s announcement follows those of celebrities like Paris...
By Emily Mullin, Wired | 10.30.2025
In 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui shocked the world when he revealed that he had created the first gene-edited babies. Using Crispr, he tweaked the genes of three human embryos in an attempt to make them immune to HIV and...
Public domain portrait of James D. Watson by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
and the National Human Genome Research Institute on Wikimedia Commons
James Watson, a scientist famous for ground-breaking work on DNA and notorious for expressing his antediluvian opinions, died on November 6, at the age of 97. Watson’s scientific eminence was primarily based on the 1953 discovery of the helical structure of DNA, for which he, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or...
