Modern day DNA testing is creeping to the forefront…

Recently I have begun watching how DNA testing is slowly but surely creeping into the forefront of the media, our minds and even our lifestyles. We are all aware of the DNA testing that has been used in crime cases (made popular by TV shows such as CSI) and proving paternity. However the goal of scientists aims much higher, criminalistics and paternity testing use only small sequences of DNA that provide enough evidence for identity but offer little other use, meanwhile the scientific community is raving about full genomic testing; that is calculating the entire sequence of your DNA.

To take a brief side step, I want to explain to you how significant this is with a few illustrations:

1. If all your DNA was taken out and stretched out it would reach the sun and back over 600 times (FYI it is 93 million miles from here to the sun).
2. There is an estimated 3 billion DNA bases (a DNA base is a basic building block of DNA – think in lego terms) in every single cell in your body
3. Our entire DNA sequence written out will fill 200 – 1000 page New York Telephone directories.

As you can imagine the very first time a full human DNA sequence was calculated it cost a lot of money…US$3 billion in fact. Since the first human DNA sequence was calculated out (finished in 2003 and took 13 years), scientists have are now able to calculate an entire human DNA sequence for just a few thousand US dollars.Many corporations are now aiming to reduce costs to the US$1000 mark, and are not far from doing so, every 2 or 3 months the costs of the method have been reduced. The Harvard Nanopore group set to reach the US$1000 mark by 2014. Not only is the cost reducing exponentially, but so is the time scale. Where calculating an entire human genome used to take years, it is now more of a matter of days.

With all this in mind it was little surprise that a human genetics commission has recently ruled that there are no specific social, ethical or legal principle to prevent pre-pregnancy DNA tests for genetic conditions. (While this is not a day to day option, such organisations are thinking ahead of time). The goal of such tests would be to calculate the risk of a couples child having a genetic disease such as cystic fibrosis for example.

Many have found the increasing rate of available DNA tests for genetic diseases alarming and this with good reason, with little support in place to help people deal with the found outcomes of such tests and the fact that this field is new and hardly regulated at all.

Although for the average person on the street this may seem far off and unfamiliar there is no doubt in my mind that the next in the next 5 – 10 years DNA testing will have radically changed our lifestyle. Medical care is already switching to prevention rather than cure and with known DNA sequences we will be able to design pharmaceuticals specific to an individual, offset risk of disease, make lifestyle choices specific to our DNA make up and maybe even design the genetic make up of our children.

What are your view on the subject? Would you like to know your own DNA? – and along with that the likelihood of certain diseases? Should we have choice over the genes we pass on?

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Tags: DNA, DNA Testing, Ethics, Sequencing