Everything You Wanted to Know About Personal Genomes (and Then Some)

Misha Angrist reacts to having his genome scan become available over at Genomeboy. "As loudly as I've agitated for public release of genomic data on this blog, I have reserved the right to redact any or all of my sequence data and my Coriell EBV-transformed cell line," he writes. He says he's the only one of the 10 participants to do so. "I have two young daughters. Yes, genomic information is probabilistic information and my genome is not theirs. But I have what I imagine every other loving father has: a fierce instinct to protect his children," he adds. His SNP data is now available at SNPedia.

Meanwhile, Emily Singer at Tech Review blogs about the PGP hoopla, which included a press conference on Monday. She goes through the participants' findings, noting that "none of the information that the participants have learned is likely to be life shattering." (Well, that's probably a good thing.)

And in case you had your fingers crossed that yet another journalist would have his genome sequenced, luck is on your side. Richard Powers writes a (loooong) article for GQ this month detailing his introduction to the personal genomics space, which is set apart from other writers' efforts by the deal he made with Knome. "For a portion of the price of their full offering, Knome proposed to make a rough cartoon of my entire genome followed by a more accurate look at those fractions of the genome known to have medical and developmental significance," he writes. He also explains why he decided against joining the PGP ("I couldn't quite imagine putting my comprehensive genetic data—data that also belonged to my whole family—online").