How would you like it if you get to know that a ‘cold’ is round the corner? Prevention, they say, is better than cure. However, it wouldn’t come to that if you actually get to know how vulnerable you are. Navigenics has developed a ‘Personal Genome Service’ that can measure your sickness-proclivity for 18 diseases, including Cancer, Alzheimer’s, Lupus and Multiple Sclerosis. Needless to say, this would lead to a scenario where you can either delay the occurence or minimize the risks significantly. With such radical developments, concerns about bioethics will certainly arise. The company, however, believes that people deserve to know how susceptible they are to diseases and thus take steps to avoid them. A true long-term strategy for sickness negation or plain business gimmicks? We would never know until we see the Genome service kit for ourselves. One question everybody seems to be asking is, “What next?”. Isn’t such a service equivalent to plain old ‘precaution’?
Navigenics claims that the service is more than just a diagnostic test. According to the company, the kit provides you with vital information about your DNA. If ‘no smoking’, eating healthy and exercising are the only way to keep sickness at bay, we certainly do not need a $2500 worth peep into the future. It would make no difference, really!
Via:NYdailynews,Image
