BOB GARFIELD:
Are you genetically predisposed to sprinting? How about developing Alzheimer's? Two Silicon Valley startups called Navigenics and 23andMe are banking on the idea that consumers will pay to know about their DNA. Navigenics will charge between two and three thousand dollars for the information; 23andMe, named for the number of paired chromosomes in a human cell, hasn't named its price yet.

Both companies are poised to enter what may be a multibillion-dollar direct-to-consumer biotech market. But what to do with your genetic information once you have it? One idea -- social networking. Think Facebook based on DNA.

David Ewing Duncan wrote about the business of genomics in November's Portfolio Magazine. He says these companies aim to wow us with our own genetic information.
DAVID EWING DUNCAN:
They will pick, out of all this data that they collect on you, probably 15 or 20 genes that have some scientific validity and have been associated with diseases such as diabetes and heart attack and even some fun ones like whether your earwax is wet or dry. I guess some people consider that fun.

So they'll pick out some of these genes that they think will be marketable to people and they will provide a subscription service.

But what these guys are really offering -- those things are available right now; there are a couple of companies online right now that will give you what I just described. What these new companies are going to really do is put together some nifty software with all kinds of information and try to dazzle you, basically, with a sort of Google Earth of genetics.
BOB GARFIELD:
You suggested in your piece that people's genetic profiles could be an opportunity for them to create communities around them, you know, in a sort of Facebook social networking style. Is that already happening?
DAVID EWING DUNCAN:
The Facebook sharing idea is already happening with ancestral DNA data. On the disease side of things, I don't know of any sites out there at the moment that are creating these shared organizations. But that is something that 23andMe talked about, at least initially. They seemed to have backed off a little on that. I think 23andMe in general started out as, you know, let's have fun with genetics, and I think that they've sobered up a little and realized that some of this information is, of course, very serious.
BOB GARFIELD:
Well, it's easy to see how this kind of service could revolutionize the relationship between people and their health, and their, and in their selves, actually. But it's also easy to see how the information could be misused, misinterpreted, abused. For example, just the presence of a gene that may predispose you to a certain disease or disorder does not necessarily doom you to that. How will people be able to, you know, accurately interpret the presence of these various genes?
DAVID EWING DUNCAN:
Much of the bioethics community considers this to be borderline irresponsible, throwing information out to people they may or may not really fully understand and, you know, might scare the bejesus out of some of them. Navigenics and 23andMe will offer genetic counseling.

For my book, I've been tested for millions of genetic markers. And, for instance, I have the heart attack gene, and I have a 64-percent greater chance of having a heart attack than someone that doesn't have this gene. And I'm not even sure, after talking, you know, spending a lot of [LAUGHS] time with geneticists even exactly what that means.
BOB GARFIELD:
When people start marching into their doctors' offices saying, you know, I have such-and-such a gene, what are you going to do about it, how are physicians going to deal with this brave new world?
DAVID EWING DUNCAN:
Well, they're already getting that. In fact, I originally wrote a story for Wired, you know, five years ago, which is ancient history in this science, and I did that exact thing. I walked into my internist and I said, okay, I have a couple of genes here -— got one for disabilities, one for high blood pressure. You know, I don't have either of those things. What do you make of it? And he said I don't know what to make of it.

In fact, that's still the state of affairs in the health care community. There's not been much training for physicians. And yet, this industry is about to do an end run around health care providers. You know, they're going directly to you and me.
BOB GARFIELD:
Let's say I swab my cheek and get my results back and it turns out that I have the gene for Huntington's Chorea, which dooms me to a horrible early death, will they tell me?
DAVID EWING DUNCAN:
Well, Huntington's is an almost unique gene. It's fairly rare, although we hear a lot about it. It is one gene or one genetic marker that almost 100 percent, if not 100 percent, of the people who have that gene will get the disease. I didn't ask any of the companies if they were going to be including Huntington's. My guess is probably not.

But there are some controversial ones. I know Navigenics has had a big debate whether to include this Alzheimer's gene. It's called ApoE4. That's an incurable disease, and any of the diseases on this list that are incurable, there's still a lot of controversy in the health community of whether this information should be provided.

BOB GARFIELD:
If genetic blueprints become common currency, it seems to me it's only a matter of time before insurance companies want to see the information, before potential employers want to see the information, before the electorate wants to see the [LAUGHS] information from candidates, in the same way they, you know, get a look at their tax returns. Is this a path that the society really wants to begin to walk down?
DAVID EWING DUNCAN:
I'm not sure that we're even near ready for what we're about to have [LAUGHING] the possibility of doing with this new science. You could, say, go to a dinner where Hillary Clinton is speaking, or one of the other candidates, and they take a drink out of a glass and, you know, you just sort of slip that into your briefcase with the lip imprint on there, and you could take it to a lab.

And, potentially, if you could pull an intact cell out of there, you could run a genetic profile of the candidate and publish that. I mean, imagine what impact that would have. These are all things that are possible right now.
BOB GARFIELD:
David, thanks so much.
DAVID EWING DUNCAN:
Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD:
David Ewing Duncan's new book, out next fall, is called Experimental Man: One Man's Journey Inside Himself, Cell by Cell.