It will become clear to those practicing open-source personal genomics that genes are not destiny; they are our common wealth.

Excerpts from Kevin Kelly, who writes a long piece on DNA sequencing, and it’s being rendered illegal, but to no avail.

It is indeed one more area where the miniaturisation of production methods means that the capital required to ‘produce’ DNA sequences is gradually moving to zero, thus becoming one more area for peer production to expand to. In the second part of his argument, he shows why a collective approach, based on sharing our genetic information, is essential.

Kevin Kelly:

1.

“laws can regulate DNA sequencing because this work must be done by big machines owned by legit companies: the Navigenics of the world. Think gigantic printing presses. But these large, capital-intensive, and easily regulated machines will be disappearing as the price of DNA sequencing keeps dropping. Sequencing is dropping in prices as fast as computer chips (because that is what powers them). The price of gene code is plunging in half every 20 months, which is roughly the 18 months of Moore’s Law. In about 25 years, it will cost only a few cents to get your entire chromosomes done. At first we’ll decipher them once in our life, then once a year and then once a day, in order to detect the effects of environmental toxins.

This means that just as computers make regulation of the press and control of copies impossible, computers embedded in DNA-tricorder devices will make regulation of DNA sequencing as impossible to control. Anyone will be able to sequence anything they want.

We will have regulations preventing the publication of sequences which some one else wishes to keep private but I suspect culture will route around this. Long before we have daily DNA sequences, we’ll begin to share our code fervently. The big surprise for me has been how eager the early adopters of personal genomics have been to share their DNA. Privacy experts have argued that nothing is so private as our genes, but I am finding that nothing is so widely sharable as our genes. Since after all, we share most of them. “

2.

“Genes shape us, but determining which gene shapes what part of us in particular is very very difficult. There are few single-gene or even double-gene mutations which cause curable diseases. Most ills are far more genetically complicated.

The only way we’ll decipher genes is through the brute force mapping of genes to bodies and behavior, which will require disclosing and sharing our genetic codes. Mapping genes without tracing their effects upon a body will not be very valuable. But each time a person reveals their genes to the science collective and starts to correlate their genes to their own bodies and behavior, the more valuable their sequence gets. This is the very recipe for the increasing returns and “network effects” that we’ve seen unleash the internet, the web and cell phones. The more who join, the better it gets. The more folks that sequence and share, the more valuable your sequence becomes. Increasing returns and network effects penalize early adopters and favors the late, but once the cycle quietly begins, it can suddenly pass the tipping point and gallop into a stampede.

There will surely be people who will not share any part of their genome with anyone under any circumstances. That’s okay. But great benefits will accrue to those who are willing to share their genome. By making their biological source code open, a person allows others to “work” on their kernel, to mutually find and remedy bugs, to share investigations into rare bits, to pool behavior results, to identify cohorts and ancestor codes. Since 99.99% of the bits are shared, why not?”