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Privacy matters. Keep your DNA to yourself

DNA sequencing has become massively faster and cheaper, and that trend is continuing. Scientific studies now can hope to take the sequences from thousands of identified individuals and correlate DNA information to richly detailed information about life-outcomes ranging from health to income to any number of socially important indicators. We do not know yet what these correlations will teach us. Some people have great faith that nothing very significant or usable will come out of them. Others believe that an alarmingly large amount of our histories will be found to be pre-coded in our DNA. That need not mean that it is inherited: there seems to be increasing evidence that specific individual variation in DNA might be more important than previously thought. Indeed, genetic heritability has already been found to be a poor predictor of almost all interesting facts about what will happen to us. But there is a lot of DNA outside the genes, and this might be much more determining.

What if it turns out that a lot of our future is in our DNA? That could have consequences ranging from the availability of health insurance to all sorts of new avenues for discrimination in the job market, the mate market (this could one day become a requirement for dating websites) and the market for goods and services like health care and education. So what should we decide to do with this information: use it to understand more and more about our world, for human progress, without worrying too much about the impacts on individuals and institutions along the way? Or preserve our privacy as an essential element of our humanity? Or can we somehow combine scientific advance and social protection?