Free Personal Genome, with a Catch

Iddo Friedberg at Byte Size Biology asks his readers whether they would like to have their genomes sequenced for free if the conditions were that it must be licensed for public use under a "liberal CC no attribution-like license," and personal information - age, height, and sex, among other things - would accompany the data. In addition, Friedberg suggests, your primary care physician would upload your medical records with each checkup, so that researchers could "fully appreciate the genotype-phenotype connection." That's because "once you contract that late-onset Cheetos addiction at the age of 65, we want to know about it," he writes. So far, the reaction has been mixed among respondents. Thirty-six percent of voters have responded with a "No way!" while 23 percent of votes said "Yes, you can even put my name on it." You can keep track of any additional responses to the poll here.