Do you want to know YOUR genes?

[Piotrek]

I'm interested what are your personal opinion about this.

Let's say it becomes avaliable that you can go to a medical/laboratory center and have you personal genome (full genetic material) sequenced (read). It is not cheap, but nor it is very expensive. Just a higher level test.

My questions are: do you know what you can benefit from it? Or maybe you can see possible threats? Would you do it, and why (or why no)?

Don't research, just answer, I'll add extra info after few responses.

 

[temi]

I am not sure I will do it for the reason you gave above but if I have an deasease and having my genome sequenced would help find a solution to my problem then I will.
But to do that as a preventive measure I will not do it. If the technology becomes affordable to do that, I am sure insurance companies would be asking you to do that test before they can offer you life insurance policy

 

[OldDarkstarAccount]

I wouldn`t take the test , maybe just if I would know for sure that I have a deasease. I visit the hospital or my doctors office very rarely. If I am ill I prefer staying at home , I never get too interested in possible bad things that could happen to me.

 

[Piotrek]

That were the answer I kind of expected, but hoped for another...

The technology (that cheap and with such a high throughtput) is not avaliable yet. Standard procedures in developed countries avaliable now allow to find out cancer markers, confirm some genetic diseases, confirm/reject paternity etc. But these techniques can "check" one to few genes at once and are widely used.

Unfortunatelly many of our healthy/unhealthy conditions depends on more than one gene acting at once. Same illness may have different combination of genetic factors, and so forth be more or less susseptible to different kinds of treatment. Would you like to know which drug will actually help you before you take a whole pack of them? Or which diet is good for you and what actually doesn't do any good to you? Would you like to know how high is your risk of developing diabetes or Alzheimer? And so on... Possibly most of this information can be aquired from reading the personal gene cook book.

What if? There is few things that require consideration like you mentioned. The access to your personal possible 'genetic traits' by third party (employer, insurance company) brings threat of discrimination.

However why should this test information be accessible for those third parties? You're not forced to say anyone if you have heart disease or if you are infected with hepatitis C virus (or type B, or A), high blood preasure or 'bad' cholesterol level. Of course if the disease (factor) you carry may be contagious (HIV, HCV) it is reasonable to warn your family and freinds/co-workers. But the point is - this are your personal informations, your genetic information is as well. So what am I going to ask is if the problem lies in the test that comes from the information itself, OR from the lack of proper legislation securing your personal information?

Now after the above is said, should the test be possible and not much expensive - would do it?

P.S.
Yeah darkstar_tfd - I don't like the doctors office as well, go there only when I see no other hope (or no hope at all considering the poor level of doctor's we face recently (you wouldn't believe, really))...