Your personal health: Free means education

October 7, 2008

One more post today. Russ Altman talks about how the cost of genotyping is asymptoting to free
(eerie parallels to Chris Anderson’s Free). The post comes on the heels of the launch of Complete Genomics and that they will enable a $5000 genome in 2010.

But that’s not the part that I want to talk about. It’s another part of the post

We must work to educate every day people about how to interpret their genome and how to use the information beneficially. Trying to protect them in a paternalistic manner is going to fail, I fear–because it will be too easy to get the information cheaply. So solutions that rely on government regulations or mandatory insertion of a physician in the process of ordering genetic sequencing (don’t get me wrong, I love physicians–I am one) are not going to work.

Given past writings on this subject, no surprise, I agree wholeheartedly. We need to educate, and educate fast.