We mentioned in Monday Note #29 the boom of personal genomics sector. A great business really, at the convergence of intimate fear, aging population, increase in health prevention expense, paranoia, untold eugenic tendencies, growing hypochondria, etc. Just to give an idea on how it smells good, among the top players : Navigenics is funded by the big venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and 23andMe was co-founded by Anne Wojcicki, wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin. (23 is the number of our chromosomes.) Legal life could be more complicated than the molecular version. These companies are under scrutiny by legislators to find out if telling someone that he has Alzheimer predisposition is comparable to an unregulated form of medicine. Lawyers are working on both sides, as they should. And geneticists are sending warning signals like in this article in the New England Journal of Medicine.
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