Getting your genome sequenced or getting genotyped is increasingly within reach for many people, including healthy people, and NBC News' Nancy Snyderman and some of her family members took a dive into their genetics. Snyderman underwent both 23andMe testing and Illumina sequencing.
"What's fascinating ... is that this is me, right here on a tablet," Snyderman tells an NBC colleague. "And as we learn more about what genes underlie specific diseases, I'll have this as a reference."
Scripps Health's Eric Topol and Robert Green from Brigham and Women's Hospital both caution that it is still early days for clinical genome sequencing. "As we roll out genomic medicine we are fighting against this society-wide misconception that having the bad gene means you're going to get the disease. That's only true in a very few cases," Green said.
Still, Anne Wojcicki from 23andMe notes that if people know their genetic information, that can help them manage their health."It's important for you to actually own your own data and be able to give it to your physician, give it to your insurance company, give it to others as you want," she adds. "But it's important for you to own it first."
As for Snyderman, she says that she found her genome to be "boring" — but that's a good thing.