WHO OWNS YOUR GENES?

摘要

THE LONG-AWAITEDarrest in May of the infamous "Golden State Killer" ignited fervent debate about the potential privacy threat of DNA ancestry services. And though the case is already slipping into history, the debate is lingering, threatening the popularity of services like 23AndMe and AncestryDNA.Investigators solved the cold case by riffling through GEDMatch, an open-source database of genetic information.While there's certainly value in understanding more about potential hereditary diseases or finding lost relatives, privacy advocates fear some users of genealogy services aren't making informed decisions about their most valuable information."I'm worried that people don't fully understand the potential risks of reidentifica-tion, law enforcement agencies getting that data, and of genetic discrimination," says Joel Reynolds, postdoctoral fellow of bioethics at the Hastings Center. "This is very high stakes."