Thursday, September 3, 2015
An article in Nature outlines some of the dilemmas facing the NIH-funded Precision Medicine Initiative when it comes to deciding how much genetic data about disease risk will be shared with an expected one million participants in the project. While medical treatments tailored to individual genomes promise to be powerful health care tools, the floods of data unleashed by such an enterprise raise vexing questions about unexpected findings and patients' ability to interpret that information. Despite those qualms, as Consortium chair Susan M. Wolf notes, “We’re past the era when scientists can simply take specimens, generate data with great health importance, and decline to offer any of that data back to people.”