The day is coming when every newborn will have her or his genome sequenced, providing a personal health database for life. But will this ability to stay ahead of sickness compromise genetic privacy?
Initial findings of the ongoing BabySeq pilot project reported in January 2019 in The American Journal of Human Genetics demonstrate the power of genomics in predicting and preventing illness.
The National Institutes of Health unveiled BabySeq in 2013 with a news release, "NIH Seeks Proposals to Study Genomic Sequencing in Newborn Period." Using "genomic" instead of "genome" allows wiggle room to count kids who've had only their exomes sequenced, the 2 percent or so of the genome that encodes proteins – the parts most often implicated in disease. (The consumer DNA testing companies use far less information, typically a smattering of 750,000 or so SNP markers across the genome.)
The BabySeq "initiative will help us better understand how we can appropriately use this information to improve health and prevent disease in infants and children," said Eric Green, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the beginning.
The project is off to a great start. But if history provides a lesson, routine newborn genomic sequencing won't come without a fight, or at least objections.
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