I recently read a Times blog post by Mark Henderson because it was referenced by Dan Vorhaus on Twitter. I have to say, I am blown away by the cognitive dissonance here......

entitled " The end of deCODE genetics: are you worried about who holds your DNA?" I was interested in to see whether this was a slash job on deCode or not.....

"Does this worry me? Not really. First of all, as Dr Stefansson pointed out to me yesterday, deCODE was a publicly traded company, listed on the NASDAQ. It was always up for sale, and in a manner of speaking its ownership was changing all the time."

Is he serious? Minor shareholders having access to a company's intellectual property and a hostile board takeover? That is what it would have taken to get the control.....or bankruptcy. Which is yet again another reason why a doctor would be able to protect this data better than a corporation.

Will there be any more doozies in this?

What I found was a hard pill for most to swallow. The end conclusion:

"What's more, though, I've yet to be convinced that there is anything particularly sensitive about an individual's genetic information. For the moment, at least, the sort of genotype data held by deCODEme isn't very useful to anybody other than me -- and even then, its chief value lies in satisfying my curiosity. I'd be much more worried if it was my financial data that was changing hands"

Ok, so here is the problem. Either you believe or you don't believe that your genome will hold useful information that may help predict your risk for disease.

If you do believe, then how could you not be scared about some discovery down the road that may be used against you by the "new owners" of your data?

If you don't believe it is a big deal, then why in the hell did you have the scan in the first place? To write a "news" story? Sorry, I mean PR piece......

In fact that's it. The people who bought these DTC tests were SV tech junkies and piss poor journalists who couldn't get anything else published. Now that they have all used up the story, there is no one left to buy decodeme.......et.al.

I do agree with the writer on one thing: There will be more failures. No amount of PR can fix that.

The Sherpa Says: Either you believe or you don't. For those who do, DeCode's failure should shake you. I am certainly glad I chose the IRB approved Coriell Personalized Medicine Collaborative to do my SNP scan.......