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The founder of Sun Microsystems, Scott McNealy, famously quipped, “Privacy is dead. Deal with it.” Giving credence to his observation, the credit card company Visa has filed a patent application for a process that would use DNA databases to identify potential customers. Although it is questionable whether information gained from our DNA profiles would be truly useful to marketers, this is a somewhat startling development and again emphasizes the need for us as a community to think carefully about how society deals with, uses, and disseminates genetic information. As professionals on the forefront of the development and use of such information for a variety of purposes, our voices should be heard.

New genomic initiatives funded by the NIH

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently announced several large awards that should propel significant progress in the research realm as well as in immediately clinically relevant ways. Three awards have been announced to large-scale genome sequencing centers at the Broad Institute, Washington University, and Baylor College of Medicine. In addition, a major effort to identify the underlying basis of Mendelian disorders was announced, funded by $40 million to the University of Washington, Yale University, and a Baylor–Johns Hopkins collaboration.

In a particularly noteworthy development for the readers of Genetics in Medicine, the National Human Genome Research Institute has created an initiative to explore the use of next-generation sequencing in clinical medicine. Over the next four years, $40 million will be distributed to support projects at five institutions: the University of Washington in Seattle, Baylor College of Medicine, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. These grants will facilitate analysis of high-throughput sequencing in the clinical arena. Additionally, a key component of these grants will examine how such information is used and perceived by patients and how best to deal with difficult issues related to the return of incidental findings.

These new initiatives reflect a comprehensive vision for advancing both basic knowledge and practical applications of genomics and should lead to exciting new developments in the near future.