Do you really want to know all of the information encoded in your genes? A thought-provoking new study shows why you might — and why you might not. It’s not science fiction. It now costs less than $10,000 to learn your own personal genome. Soon it will cost no more than $1,000. What might you learn? Ask Stephen Quake, PhD, a Stanford University bioengineer. Recently, Quake and colleagues showed that a whole human genome — his own — could be unraveled by a single technician using a single machine. When a 19-year-old relative died suddenly in his sleep, Quake began to wonder whether the information he collected could tell him whether he risked the same fate. He took his genome to cardiologist Euan Ashley, MD, who runs Stanford’s hypertrophic cardiomyopathy center. ‘This made me start thinking about what doctors are supposed to do when a patient walks into your office, shows you his whole genome, and asks, ‘What is in my crystal ball?” Ashley tells WebMD. ‘It’s a challenge. Lots of people have looked at human genomes, but nobody had ever looked at a single patient before.’ Ashley and Quake assembled a large group of […]