Is Your DNA Data Safe in Blackstone’s Hands?

We’re beginning to get a picture of the people who might have a goldmine in their genome.

The paradox of treating your own DNA as a commodity is that you’d actually be lucky if you’ve got a rare, poorly understood genetic disease, as those troublesome stretches of DNA may be the most valuable for medical research, explains Dennis Grishin, the cofounder of Nebula Genomics, a California company offering whole genome sequencing. You’d be luckier still if you have genetic patterns that would usually cause you to become ill with a disease like this, and yet appear completely healthy. That’s one variety of in-demand DNA: genomes belonging to people that Grishin calls “natural knockouts,” meaning genetic variations in the disease-associated genes in their genomes somehow save them from falling ill.

“There are people who have ‘broken genes’ and actually should be severely sick. But they are not sick for some reason, and we don’t really understand why,” Grishin says. “So there is some kind of compensatory mechanism going on that prevents people from getting sick.”

Sequencing the genomic data of these...