When my friend offered to allow me to throw his 1,000,000 marker genotype out into the public domain last week I did understand that this would be of marginal utility in and of itself. After all there are many Ashkenazi genotypes out there, and he didn’t give any phenotypic information. That being said, I didn’t think it would hurt. And second, I wanted to encourage others to throw their own data out there. My rationale is partly driven in the medium term by the issues which Joe Pickrell outlined a few months ago, Why DTC genetic testing is good for research.
In the larger context there’s a lot of fear out there (thanks Ethan Hawke!). I think it’s unfounded, and unless some of us dispel the fear by taking proactive steps I think we’re stuck in a coordination problem. It seems likely that what looms in front of us is radical transparency. Genotypes are just the tip of the iceberg, but we need to be prepared. Britain’s surveillance state probably gives us a taste of this future (good or bad). But, I have a hope that enormous sample sizes driven by “crowd-sourced” personal genomes may …