From FierceBiotech IT [editors@fiercebiotechit.com]

"Tech glitterati strut DNA online

By George Miller

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Ten DNA-sequenced volunteers are posting this most private information online, unprotected. You’ll recognize some of them by reputation, if not their DNA: pioneering technologist Esther Dyson, and high-ranking individuals from the tech/biotech industries and academia.

They are baring all, so to speak, mainly to see what happens. George Church, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, is behind the exposure. He, Dyson and eight others will post not just their DNA, but also medical records and descriptions of their physical traits, says Forbes.

It’s an effort called the Personal Genome Project, in which the volunteers will relate the experience of having such personal information publicly available. Researchers want to determine the risks of DNA exposure, and learn how to develop software capable of managing human-scale DNA data volumes.

The ten volunteers are just the beginning. Researchers are in the process of recruiting the first 10,000 volunteers, on their way to 100,000 from the general public.

– read the Forbes article
– check out the project Internet site
– here are one volunteer’s annotation results
– see the intro video "