Saturday, October 27, 2007

Genetics just for you

Plos Bio on individualized genomics. Ten or twenty years for now, a person's genetic sequence will be the first and most basic piece of personal data; I expect babies to be sequenced in utero, for at least some digest of the sequence to be part of IDs, etc. Note that "basic" doesn't mean "private"; I don't really think it will be possible for genetic information to be kept under control, for more or less the same reasons that make DRM schemes impractical.

This, of course, will open a can of worms.