What are the potential benefits of personal sequencing?
Personal genome sequencing represents uncharted waters in our society. The benefits and risks of sequencing are likely to be connected, complex, and largely unknowable until years have passed and the consequences are examined across several generations. However, thinking through the issues surrounding personal genomics now, rather than later, may help to avoid potential pitfalls and ensure that the good outweighs the bad.
The benefits of sequencing are mainly thought to be in the medical arena. In the long term, sequencing of many individuals could provide new information on the genetic basis of poorly understood diseases, with the potential to provide new therapies. However, there may also be immediate benefits based on our current understanding of genetics and health. Knowledge of elevated risks for known diseases could allow you to make proactive decisions about your health; visiting the doctor for more frequent check ups or screenings, choosing one type of prescription drug over another based on your metabolism, altering your diet or exercise plan, informing reproductive decisions, or making certain kinds of arrangements for your future medical care are all ways that you might use the information that you learn from your sequence. This individualized avenue of health care is often referred to as “personalized medicine”.
In addition to medical benefits, some believe that the advent of widespread sequencing could foster new connections among different people or groups. For example, people with shared genetic variants and mutations may wish to contact one another in order to discuss their common experiences, just as people living with debilitating diseases do currently (imagine Facebook groups or other web services serving people from around the world who share specific genetic traits).
Furthermore, the growing interest in genealogy in many parts of the world would be well served by knowledge of one’s personal genetic makeup. Finally, the widespread sequencing of individuals from many different ethnic and social backgrounds will remind us that everyone has something “wrong” with them, and could serve to disprove the ideas that certain types of social inequities are biologically founded and therefore unchangeable.