$1,000 Personal Genome Coming: Are We Ready? | Hacker News Reader

$1,000 Personal Genome Coming: Are We Ready?

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16 pointsjacquesm8 comments

Of course we're ready. Not knowing about a disease risk doesn't make it go away. Yes, some people will be saddened by new knowledge of their genome. But in the cost-benefit analysis, that downside is overwhelmed by the massive improvement in medical care. Customized medicine. Preventative care. Screening embryos for diseases. Etcetera etcetera. So many lives will be saved. So many lives will be improved. So what if some irrational people feel bad?

Who's going to pay for the curing of these diseases? Insurance companies? I'm sure the more popular diseases will become cheap enough for anyone to afford, but who's to say insurance companies won't deny you coverage to an uncommon disease based on the information your genome gives?

There's already a law preventing insurance companies and employers from discriminating based on genetics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Information_Nondiscrimi...

The benefits are huge of the knowledge learned with knowing your genome. My fear is that it takes us one step closer to the society in Gattaca. I envision that it will start in the sports world where athlete's genomes will be used to determine their athletic potential. Its amazing that the cost is so low, but I can't help but ponder the possible negatives.

Everybody talks about the society in Gattaca as if it's a bad thing, but what was really that bad about it? It kinda sucked for those who were born unenhanced, but give it another fifty years and there probably won't be any of those any more (they'll eventually figure out you can just freeze your sperm and have a vasectomy at puberty).

For everybody else, life might not have been perfect, but it was a lot better in many ways than life is today. It wasn't shown on screen, but they'd presumably gotten rid of an awful lot of horrible genetic diseases, and probably eradicated poverty by ensuring everybody has at least the minimum intelligence level required to make a decent living.

Oh, and also: everyone was pretty.

What's bad about it is that messing with the engine of evolution without fully understanding it risks becoming a mono culture in one form or another, possibly without realizing it.

The blind watchmaker has done a pretty good job so far, my vote is on letting the guy continue without messing with the mechanism until wel really understand how it works.

The whole picture reminds me of guys with hammers that try to 'improve' a jet engine or a computer. If this is an act of reverse engineering a piece of software, and I believe there are enough parallels with the computer world to justify using that term then you're looking at the equivalent of knowing a few interesting peeks and pokes and the basic opcodes but you are still far away from 'grokking' the program as a whole, so any modifications you make can have consequences beyond what you currently understand.

> and probably eradicated poverty by ensuring everybody has at least the minimum intelligence level required to make a decent living

So all we have to do to eliminate poverty is to get rid of the stupid people?

That's my hypothesis, anyway.

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