Your status message could scare off potential employers, and we're not talking about the time you thought "OMG I really love petting kittens!" was a message worthy of the world. The growth of companies offering on-demand sequencing means more people than ever before have access to their genetic information, and some are posting it online. You'll be astonished to learn how that might be a bad idea.
There are different reasons for digitizing your DNA: some people are volunteering for vital genetic research which will benefit the entire species. Those are the good guys, and while we don't want to be too dramatic in our contrast here, other people are flinging their choromosomes online like a crappy Facebook application. Almost exactly like that, with services like 23andMe which provides a social networking site based entirely on your genome. No, we're not making this up. Yes, we wish we were.
For those of you who haven't seen GATTACA, thought about genetic profiling, or can't remember European history between 1939 and 1945 this idea has a few tiny issues. The first and most important is that we really don't understand the genome yet and anyone who says otherwise is looking for funding. Don't get us wrong: genetic research has already saved countless lives, will save more, and is the most important research ever conducted since some monkeys decided to see what the ground was like - we just don't know everything yet.
Posting your entire gene sequence online could have massive unintended consequences, and not just for you. It speaks volumes about your family and children, volumes we'll very soon be able to read. Do you want to make your daughter unemployable because of a risk of heart failure? Do your want your son to die alone because of a unsupported, inadequate, but headline-friendly study on psychoses?
Because that's the real risk. The combination of real information with hideous media misunderstandings has done more damage to scientific progress than the Legion of Doom and the Holy Inquisition combined, and an online record of your genome means that any idiot with a search program, a few minutes, and an utter inability to rate "scientific" articles for quality can judge you at the cellular level.
If you're helping the species move past our own evolved limitations, if you actually understand both sides of the story, it's obviously worth it. But don't do it because you're bored of Twitter.
Posted by Luke McKinney.
The risks of online genetic information
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