Misunderstanding the genome: a (polite) rantVia Ars Technica...

Misunderstanding the genome: a (polite) rant

Via Ars Technica UK (Image by Micah Baldwin)

“…Some misconceptions result from mistaken intuition; common sense can be misleading in biology. Some stem from the difference between healthcare and public health. Small false positive and negative rates quickly add up when we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people, after all. And some are legal misconceptions—what the FDA does or doesn’t care about or what information an insurance company is allowed to use.

In any case, we’re a long way off from using genomes to tell us how smart our kids are or how well they’ll do athletically, if such a thing is even possible in the first place. Genes, after all, aren’t our destiny.”