The Genome Factor: What the Social Genomics Revolution Reveals about Ourselves, Our History, and the Future by Dalton Conley & Jason Fletcher

Author:Dalton Conley & Jason Fletcher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2016-04-19T04:00:00+00:00

CONCLUSION: WHITHER GENOTOCRACY?

One effect of the social genomics revolution that is not yet fully felt is how people will deal with and understand genetic information about themselves and their loved ones. Now that genetic data are becoming widely available, how will this new knowledge be used by the larger populace—that is, big data meets big public? Who will translate this so-called language of life for nonspecialists—those of us who know only snippets of the relevant words and concepts and who have not thought about biology or genetics since high school or college? How do we sift through the clutter of raw data, false positives, and real risks, especially when much of it is in a language that most of us do not understand?

Nowadays, you can spit into a cup, mail the contents to 23andme or a similar company, and enter your credit card information online. About four weeks and a hundred dollars later, you will have access to one million bits of information about your genome, such as whether you have the genetic variant TA or AA or TT (a million times across your genome). For nearly everybody, this unfiltered information is completely useless. It is similar to trying to read the ones and zeros of a digital computer file for the first time. The ones and zeros tell you what a machine (your cells and body) is programmed to do, but no one knows yet how to read the complete text to understand what the program will do under different circumstances. Geneticists have assigned phenotypic relevance to some of these data, but otherwise they remain a mystery. In the early days of the industry, 23andme and similar companies would also send you an assessment—translating these TAs, AAs, and TTs for you. They might send you pie charts, line graphs, and summaries such as “your odds of having a stroke are 20 percent higher than average”; “your odds of developing Alzheimer’s disease are 18 percent higher than average”1—scary stuff.2 But the FDA has ruled that these assessments are basically junk.3 For a number of years these companies could only send you assessments about your genetic heritage—that you may have distant cousins in Kenya (or Texas) or have a lot of Neanderthal DNA in your genome. (However, in February 2015, the FDA decision was partially rolled back by allowing companies to describe specific genetic risk factors on a smaller class of inherited health conditions. Stay tuned.4)

But this regulatory hurdle is really just a hiccup. It will not be long before you can hire companies to take your genetic data and create polygenic scores for anything—from educational attainment to BMI to entrepreneurship proclivity to risk of depression. And these scores will become more accurate over the next decade in their capacities to predict. Right now a polygenic score predicts about 6 percent of the variance in educational attainment among populations of European descent, but some think it will get close to 20 percent (or higher) over time. (Even with low predictive power,

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