Preserving Your Genetic Privacy | Gregory Hannon | Big Think

Preserving Your Genetic Privacy

New videos DAILY

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As sequencing individuals’ genomes becomes cheaper and easier, how can we prevent the release of private genetic information onto the Web?

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gregory Hannon:

Dr. Gregory Hannon is a molecular biologist and a Professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, as well as an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His research focuses on growth control in mammalian cells and post-transcriptional gene silencing. Dr. Hannon received his PhD from Case Western Reserve University in 1992

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What kinds of bioethical issues arise in your work, and how do you address them?

Gregory Hannon: In our own work, I think we encounter bioethical issues in a few different ways. One is anytime we are dealing with experiments with living animals. There are certain standards that we have to maintain about the treatment of those animals. And we also try to plan using statistical tests to make sure that we use enough animals to get a definitive answer, but no more than we actually need to do an experiment.

From the standpoint of using human materials, we encounter issues of bioethics in two different ways. They are in some ways related and I think this goes to the development of a lot of these new high-capacity technologies that are being deployed in biology at the moment. So, on one hand, anytime we use human’s samples, there are a set of rules that are in place to maintain the anonymity of patients. And so, for example, when tumor samples are collected, they are anonymized and we have no way of tracing back the material that we are analyzing to the patient that was its source.

The difficulty comes as we are more and more able to sequence people’s complete genomes for reasonable cost and in a very short time. If you think about how long the human genome project took and what its cost, I mean it was astronomical, compared to today when we could conceivably sequence an entire human genome in probably a week, maybe two weeks and presently for a cost of $40,000 to $50,000. And that time it’s taking to resequence a genome and the cost of doing so is dropping continuously to the point where, really by the end of this year, it will be down to $10,000 and maybe one week. And who knows where we will be in another year or so.

Essentially, once you have determined that genomic sequence, there is a unique identifier, an identifier unique to that person in whom the sample was derived. Now, if we go to publish data derived from that sequence, we are obligated to put the primary – the raw data to make it available to the community. So that means that a sample has turned into a sequence which is unique to that individual, which then essentially, in some ways, public. Now for other investigators to access that, they need to have specific bioethics training, etc., but that information is out there. And although it’s not immediately connected to that person from which that sample is derived, it is in some ways eventually connectable.

Read the full transcript at