Genetic testing mix-up reignites regulation debate

There's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, as is usual with these things.

The problem with rare and expensive new technology, as genetic engineering was until quite recently, is that it acquires totemic significance. Everyone reads about it, but few people experience it directly, so it's easy to fantasize about it and imbue it with all sorts of magical powers. One of my favorite examples of this -- because it's just so ham-handed about it -- is a 1950 B movie called Radar Secret Service, as spoofed on Mystery Science Theater 3000:

http://mst3k.wikia.com/wiki/Radar_Secret_Service

In this film universe radar is everywhere and can do anything - find valuable mineral deposits deep underground, locate large schools of fish underwater, etc, and all from thousands of miles away! Worship radar at the church of your choice.

Of course, in 1950 radar was an amazing war-winning technology that only MIT researchers and Air Force techs had any direct experience with. Sixty years later, now that radar has come and gone as a trendy police speed-measurement technology (it's all about the LIDAR now) and every local weatherperson has had a big Doppler radar display for twenty years, radar is kind of normal.

People's attitude toward genetics is such that if a woman is handed a genetic profile of a black man and told it is hers she will actually entertain thoughts that she might be a black man. People hear that they have the gene "for" some rare disease ("p < 0.05") and then contemplate suicide because the Book of Destiny has foretold their certain doom. This attitude is no joke: It really is an intense, potentially traumatic emotional experience to read a genetic scan at this point. One is reminded of the cultures in which people think that being photographed is to have one's soul stolen. Laugh at such cultures at your peril, for in our own culture to read one's genes is to read one's soul, one's essence, and one's entire future.

These beliefs will fade eventually. I actually think the 23andme incident might be helpful for public education. The biggest problem with genetic data at this point is that people take it way, way too seriously. Turning it into a laughingstock would be a positive development. Reading genes needs to feel more like reading the Daily Racing Form, or shopping for fashionable prescription sunglasses, and less like touring a funeral home, scoring poorly on the SAT, or attending an exorcism.

(Of course, as someone who almost certainly does not harbor the gene for Huntington's disease, this is easy for me to say.)