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Taking a peek at the experts’ genetic secrets
- ilamont 18y agoI read this, and the Wired article on PGP that came out earlier this year. I think it's great that researchers want to improve access to genetic data correlated with behavior, habits, illness and other traits, but I have to ask: Why not just keep the subects' names obscured? It doesn't matter to most researchers if they are looking at the results from subject #098352 vs. John Smith, either as a single record or in aggregate. Tacking on the other part of the project -- seeing how subjects' benefit/suffer from the release of their personal information -- may be an interesting experiment on its own, but it could have some very negative impacts on participants and skew the data toward people with a different set of values and lifestyles than the population at large.