Hacker News Reader

Comment by bpodgursky | Hacker News Reader

Yeah and I'm digging into this because I personally would much prefer that these GWAS studies have access to my genome and medical data, so they can design drugs for whatever my specific genotype is. I think it's far more likely that this will benefit me and my children, than hurt me.

I'm not telling other people they are wrong to be afraid, but I want to understand the exact mechanism of those fears.

View on HN

If you're interested and a US citizen, look into the All of Us program by NIH. They're going to sequence a million people's genome (!!) and allow researchers to use it. And they're doing it in a very careful safe way. It will mean many researchers will have your deanonymized genome (and it's up for debate if it's possible to truly future-proof deanonymize a genome) but it's not sketchy at all and will be a huge help for future generations IMO.

And if you're in another country, especially european ones, look into other research programs, there are lots round

Why drugs? These GWAS studies should be looking at nutrition.

I guess I agree on principle and diet is understated. But let's say, as has happened recently, you're looking at Alzheimer's or lewey body syndrome and you find the gwas returns a lot of results for a certain cellular pathway (like a stress response or where a cell breaks down misfolded proteins, leading to plaques). You can look for small molecule drug which targets that, or try a fancier treatment to target that exact protein. But how would that insight extend to diet?

Beyond just eating more health (in whatever way) and exercising more, which does go a long way. Thse drugs are trying to be extremely targeted and intricate in now they work

Alzheimer’s, for example, is most likely being caused by a metabolic problem. This will be solved with nutrition. I even believe it can be limited if the correct nutrition (enzymatic cofactors) are discovered.

For example https://fjfsdata01prod.blob.core.windows.net/articles/files/...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com