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I think the fundamental thing you're missing is that a gene's behavior throughout your life depends on more than just its sequence. Everything else that goes on

I think the fundamental thing you're missing is that a gene's behavior throughout your life depends on more than just its sequence. Everything else that goes on in your body, and in particular everything that goes in and comes out of your body, can impact when genes are triggered to form proteins, how those proteins fold, and what effect the proteins have. At best, gene sequence data like you describe could provide rough probabilities for some health conditions. That's as likely to lead to over-treatment for a non-problem as catching a real problem early. Sure, there would be some cases where everyone who has a certain sequence winds up with the same disease, and it'd be good to discover those early in life. (Ex: my wife was born with Wilson's Disease, which causes liver failure by early adulthood 100% of the time without treatment.) But those cases would probably be very few compared to the number of people who get freaked out by things that might become an issue, but probably won't, and the cases where the correlation is too weak to provide a warning, but a health problem occurs.

knicholes 10y ago
I think a great example of gene expression based on environment is that of the himalayan rabbit. Cold temperatures trigger black fur growth whereas warm temperatures allow the fur to be white.
- cjbprime 10y ago
  Domestic cats are also good examples of two genetic phenomena: Siamese cats can have white fur but dark paws and face, it's because of a temperature sensitive mutation enzyme. Tortoiseshell cats are usually female, and the patterns in their fur are a result of X-chromosome inactivation happening in random clumps of cells.
duaneb 10y ago
I don't think the value is directly diagnosis but rather an increased understanding as to the genes' contributions.
fleitz 10y ago
Yeah I've always thought of genes as like dynamic code, it's hard to tell what's going on until you run it
- tkinom 10y ago
  I used to work for company that make DNA sequencer machine as embedded SW dev ~20 years ago. I think the genes is more like static code. One can clone it easily. RNA is like the stack, RSS, Register states - expression of the genes. DNA is like a class, RNA is the object that is instantiation of the class. BTW, the double helix structure is very much like full unit test coverage for the bio-programming.

knicholes 10y ago

I think a great example of gene expression based on environment is that of the himalayan rabbit. Cold temperatures trigger black fur growth whereas warm temperatures allow the fur to be white.

cjbprime 10y ago
Domestic cats are also good examples of two genetic phenomena: Siamese cats can have white fur but dark paws and face, it's because of a temperature sensitive mutation enzyme. Tortoiseshell cats are usually female, and the patterns in their fur are a result of X-chromosome inactivation happening in random clumps of cells.

duaneb 10y ago

I don't think the value is directly diagnosis but rather an increased understanding as to the genes' contributions.

fleitz 10y ago

Yeah I've always thought of genes as like dynamic code, it's hard to tell what's going on until you run it

tkinom 10y ago
I used to work for company that make DNA sequencer machine as embedded SW dev ~20 years ago. I think the genes is more like static code. One can clone it easily. RNA is like the stack, RSS, Register states - expression of the genes. DNA is like a class, RNA is the object that is instantiation of the class. BTW, the double helix structure is very much like full unit test coverage for the bio-programming.