Anne Wojcicki, wife of google co-founder Sergey Brin, has been getting some publicity recently for her work as co-founder of 23andMe, a silicon valley startup that will sequence 500,000 of the 3 billion single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that make up the human genome for the price of $1000 and your spit. The idea is to determine a person’s risk of developing a variety of diseases.
There are a couple problems with this, which 23andMe is by no means trying to deny. First, sequencing all 3 billion SNPs is too cost prohibitive, but sequencing anything less means you’re inevitably unable to screen for some things. This isn’t too big of a problem. Increases in computation power, as dictated by Moore’s Law, will force the price of getting the entire human genome sequenced to be affordable.
The bigger problem is that scientists haven’t figured out how to link very many diseases with DNA mutations. It might be nice if every disease had a unique genetic marker that consisted of only a few nucleic acids arranged in a particular order, something that was easy to identify, so a geneticist could say “Yeah, sir, you’re going to die of Parkinson’s.” But if things were that easy, lots of researchers would be out of jobs. Even if it has been determined that someone is predisposed to developing a certain cancer, figuring out at how much greater risk they are relative to the general population is hardly more than guesswork. This problem, like the lack of computational power, will be solved with time. As the pool of sequenced human genomes grows larger, new associations between disease and DNA will surface and become clearer. Maybe the biggest problem is that this research is incapable of accounting for environmental factors, unless these factors have altered the DNA.
The previous three paragraphs aren’t the point of this post. I don’t often write about news. I included them because it might have been from having read an article about 23andMe that I got to thinking about this: in the interest of longevity and health, collect sperm and egg samples from donors and coarsely monitor the donors’ health until they die. The sperm and egg samples from donors who die under the age of 90 or from something other than “natural causes” are used for research or thrown out. The remaining samples are genetically healthy enough to be used for procreation. I would be a sick doctor.