As the capabilities and uses of the technology are to a large extent unknown, and most violations are probably covered by privacy laws, trying enact laws for things that might happen is an exercise in futility and a sign of the over eager public to legislate for every conceivable aspect of life.

Get a life.

I seem to recall a similar thread on this topic some months back.

There are a couple of aspects that cause me concern, primarily around the question "who has a right to know".

I know that my insurance company would like to know my potential susceptibility to disease, and also what steps I am taking to minimize my/their risk.

"...if you knew all the genes of your own genome you could make an accurate risk estimate for many of the inheritable human diseases that you might be predisposed to or more importantly what drugs would work best in preventing or delaying the diseases from ever occurring."

I might like to keep the information to myself, but I can see the time will come when they will tell me "if you don't share this information with us, we cannot insure you".

Parallel with my right to refuse would be their right to "full disclosure", just as it is today.

Would a hospital also require me to provide the information to them also, just as today they will ask me "have you had x disease, are you taking medication?" etc. If I have private health insurance, would they refuse to pay out if I don't provide the hospital with the information they need to speed my recovery?

Legislation isn't the answer either. This is very much a two-edged sword, and neither side in the disclose/keep secret debate has an all-embracing solution.

Just as it is with splitting the atom, this genie will not go back into the bottle, for good or ill.

On balance the technology is advantageous to medicine. In time we will be able to predict the likelihoods of certian diseases. Not that that will matter much - we all know what smoking does but knowledge is not enough to change behaviour for many.

I tend to agree with Shadow Minister - it's worthy of concern but no reason to lose sleep over it. Yet.

For the moment this is still cutting edge stuff and tailor-made medicine is a long way off. It seems to me the current main benefit is the wow factor. Fiddling with a person's DNA is not the same as GM in plants and other animals, hence the lax and lagging regulations surrounding GM.

If insurance companies begin demanding DNA analyses it'd be a different story. Time to change the law.

While there are great opportunities for medical science in improving the lot of Homo sapiens in modern society, where will opportunities be most readily taken? From current directions in the legal entrepreneural scene, more insurance might be appropriate for the milkman.

The wait and see if it will go away approach to this technological development is not going to be very helpful.

The stated goals for one of the new start up biotech 'master of the Universe' is to by 2013 to own and explore a database of one million complete human genomes.

When one company has got this amount of proprietary data ( and the computing power to crunch it) they would be the Google of the next decade. As a matter of fact Google is interested in these developments
(www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvpMk0xAxpE).

And it makes sense that a company that makes their money out of mining vast amount of data is interested in the wealth of information in the human gene pool.

But the question is if we can trust the company motto ' Do no evil' in this case.