Old-Thinker News | March 30, 2012
By Daniel Taylor
Facebook has amassed a gigantic database of human intelligence from its millions of users. This information has been used by police in the arrest of suspects, and is milked by marketers. What if a similar system gathered genetic information?
In 2005 it was revealed in a book called The Google Story that Dr. Craig Venter, known for his creation of synthetic lifeforms, was in discussions with Larry Page and Sergey Brin [founders of Google] to:
“…generate a gene catalogue to characterize all the genes on the planet and understand their evolutionary development. Geneticists have wanted to do this for generations… Google will build up a genetic database, analyze it, and find meaningful correlations for individuals and populations.”
Google has been funding a program to do just that called 23 and me. In 2006 the organization was co-founded by Anne Wojcicki, the wife of Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google.
Will the general public be acclimated to share their genetic information online as they were with Facebook to share personal information? Facebook has altered the public perception of privacy. As Time magazine reported in 2010, “The willingness of Facebook’s users to share and overshare — from descriptions of our bouts of food poisoning (gross) to our uncensored feelings about our bosses (not advisable) — is critical to its success.”
A recent article from Discover magazine pointed out that:
“Many researchers believe that personal genomics will really not hit the biomedical sweet spot until you have on the order of a million people sequenced. But even then in the American system how to get a hold of all that information is going to be problematic, since it will likely be decentralized.”
What this article fails to point out is that it has become known that the DNA of newborns has been secretly collected in America for decades. Samples have even been provided to U.S. Military labs. Also present in this issue is the prospect of who own the copyright your DNA.
If the government already has a database of millions of people’s DNA, what function could an organization like 23 and me fulfill?
