(We have two copies of each gene one from our mom, and one from our dad. I hoped my response would be a productive one, a kick in the pants to maximize the time I had, or, later in life, be better prepared for something like Alzheimer's.īut in actuality, it's more likely I was banking on the fact that it was exceedingly unlikely I'd be predestined for something like early-onset Alzheimer's, given how rare it is in general and the fact that it had never turned up in my family.īut as I discovered, it was also unlikely I'd learn something particularly useful, or "actionable," as geneticists describe it, a dominant mutation that would predispose me to a treatable cancer or heart disease, for example. In truth, I wasn't sure how I would feel. "Are you ready to learn that, if it falls that way?" "It's important for you to imagine what you would feel like if you learned that you had a mutation" that suggested I was headed toward some currently untreatable, disastrous disease, Green, who is associated with Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, told me the first time we met. Illumina also connected me with Green, my geneticist (whose visits were covered by my insurance). For $2,900, Illumina does what's known as a whole genome sequence, mapping every A, T, C and G that make up my 3 billion base pairs of DNA. I participated in a program called Understand Your Genome, provided by sequencing company Illumina. Huge questions loom about cost, privacy and our own abilities to handle this kind of knowledge about ourselves.īecause sequencing healthy people isn't a common medical practice, it's not all that easy to do. And already, gene sequencing is making major impacts on cancer care, diagnostics and drug development.īut it's still controversial how much genome sequencing is necessary, or even very useful on a personal level. President Barack Obama has announced a Precision Medicine Initiative to accelerate what's possible using this genetic information. Our ability to map our own genes will be a bigger and bigger part of our medical care even in just the next decade. Obviously, given my hunt for the thumb drive, the answer is yes. What if I learned something dreadful? What if I was destined to get a disease that has no cure? What if I carried mutations that could burden my future children with something awful? Did I really want to know? This made me feel very cool of course, but having your genome sequenced is a scary thing. Robert Green, likes to tell me, I'm among a group of medical pioneers. As my geneticist, Harvard Medical School's Dr. That puts me in the minority of people who have their genomes sequenced today. There was no problem I was trying to solve or specific answer I was seeking. I had set out in August to have my genome sequenced, mainly out of curiosity. It's in that last one-tenth of 1 percent where we find all of human variation - those things that make us special: athletic abilities (not so much in my case), frizzy hair (unfortunately for me) … and in some cases, a predisposition to disease. It turns out, in the grand scheme, we're all very, very similar, genetically: 99.9 percent of people's genes are identical. Personal Loans for 670 Credit Score or Lower Personal Loans for 580 Credit Score or Lower Best Debt Consolidation Loans for Bad Credit
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