Since his move to Wired I swear that Dr. Daniel MacArthur has gotten a bit more pugnacious. In any case, today he has a post up which smacks-down the A.M.A.’s attempt to expand the long arm of its regulatory capture:
The American Medical Association has written a letter to the US Food and Drug Administration as part of the lead-up to the FDA’s meeting on direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing next month. The tone is predictable: the medical establishment is outraged by the idea of people having access to their own genetic information without the supervision of its members, and they want the FDA to stop it….
Over the past six months I’ve gotten really into analyzing genotypes of friends & family. Sometimes I talk about this excitedly, and people worry about the “risks.” When I ask what risks they’re worried about, usually people offer the vague and content-free fear of “what you could find out.” First, if you have family information, that’s usually much more powerful than the “disease risk” estimates that these firms are giving you. In 99% of the cases, if that’s your primary concern it’s not worth the money. Second, if you’re terrified about what ancestry inference …