Can a wiki cure cancer? Can a crowds hack genetic disease? Over at the blog, Bits, they are speculating why “Google co-founder Sergey Brin on Thursday disclosed that he carried a genetic mutation that gave him a higher-than-average risk of contracting Parkinson’s disease.” Their speculation is that Brin might be thinking that it…
“…could be useful to have one’s DNA code open to the public, where it could follow a sort of open-source model. If his data was public, he said, doctors — or anyone who was interested — could look at his results and make suggestions about how he should handle them, offering treatment suggestions if it showed he might be susceptible to a disease.”
That would assume that there is information that is decentralized and unshared, which of course, is a category that the DNA of individuals falls into.
But would people share their DNA? I think they would, for the same reason that they share so much on the Internet now: the risk is very low and the reward is not insignificant.
It is only a small posting, but the post, Why Sergey Brin May Have Disclosed His Risk for Parkinson’s at Bits Blog on the NYTimes.com is interesting.
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