Your DNA is a valuable asset, so why give it to ancestry websites for free? | Laura Spinney

DNA testing companies are starting to profit from selling our data on to big pharma. Perhaps they should be paying usThe announcement by 23andMe, a company that sells home DNA testing kits, that it hassold the rights to a promising new anti-inflammatory drug to a Spanish pharmaceutical company is cause for celebration. The collected health data of 23andMe ’s millions of customers have potentially produced a medical advance – the first of its kind. But a few weeks later the same company announced that it was laying off workers amid a shrinking market that its CEO put down to the public ’s concerns about privacy.These two developments are linked, because the most intimate data we can provide about ourselves – our genetic make-up – is already being harvested for ends we aren’t aware of and can’t always control. Some of them, such as better medicines, are desirable, but some of them should worry us.Continue reading...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Genetics Biology Science Privacy Data protection Technology World news Source Type: news