A time when everyone may have his or her genome sequence is increasingly possible, but may it may tell people more than they want to know, Kevin Loria writes at Tech Insider. In particular, he says, people may learn at a young age that they are at risk for a disease such as Alzheimer's, and there's nothing that can be done.
"There would be a high likelihood of identifying many ticking time-bombs or risks that we would still have no way of addressing," he says. "That could mean living an entire life knowing that you are, in a way, 'sick.'"
Currently, Loria says that sequencing has been a boon for treating cancer patients and for diagnosing people with mysterious genetic diseases, and adds that new personalized medicine initiatives will uncover more about the genetics behind disease.
"But we'll have to make a decision about how much screening we want, and whether we want to know — potentially from birth — what illnesses and conditions lie in wait, even ones that we don't know how to cure," he says.