Googling your genes: Personal genomics and the discourse of citizen bioscience in the network age

Journal of Science Communication

Volumn 9, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 1-8

  Levina, Marina ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77955865135     PISSN: None     EISSN: 18242049     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.22323/2.09010206     Document Type: Article

References (43)

1. The author would like to thank Rina Bliss for her review of the manuscript and for providing the data archive. A note of gratitude is also due to anonymous reviewers. Their thoughtful comments helped to make this a much better work.
2. 23andMe official Web site, http://www.23andme.com (accessed October 30, 2008).
3. J. Kaiser, "Breakthrough of the Year: It's All About Me," Science Magazine 318, no.5858 (December 21, 2007): 1843, http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/318/5858/1843
4. The 7th Annual Year in Ideas, The New York Times, (December 9, 2007), http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B05EFDA1730F93AA35751C1A9619C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=6.
5. CBS Evening News, Searching for Answers in DNA, (January 16, 2008), http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/01/30/eveningnews/main3773346.shtml, (accessed August 20, 2008).
6. M. Schulman, Double Helix Dept.: Ptooey!, The NewYorker, (September 22, 2008), http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2008/09/22/080922ta_talk_schulman.
7. T. Goetz, 23andMe will Decode your DNA for $1,000. Welcome to the Age of Genomics, Wired Magazine, no. 15.12 (November 1, 2007).
8. Tim O'Reilly coined the term Web 2.0, which he defined as "the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them." It is now widely used to describe the use of the web as an interactive network platform. O'Reilly Radar Blog site, December 10, 2006, http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/12/web-20-compact-definition-tryi.html, (accessed October 30, 2008).
9. M. Castells (2000), The Rise of the Network Society. 2 ed. vol. 1, of The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Oxford, Blackwell Publications (2000)
10. M. Hardt and A. Negri (2000), Empire, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.
11. The Rise of the Network Society
12. D. Singh Grewal (2008), Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization, New Haven: Yale University Press, 9.
13. Network Power, 4
14. The Empire, 166
15. T. Terranova (2004), Network Culture: Politics for Information Age, London, Pluto Press.
16. A. Galloway and E. Thacker (2007), The Exploit: A Theory of Networks, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
17. G. Deleuze (1995), Negotiations, trns. Martin Joughin, New York, Columbia University Press, 178.
18. Negotiations, 181.
19. Negotiations, 180.
20. K.D. Haggerty and R.V. Ericson (2000), The Surveillant Assemblage, British Journal of Sociology 51(4): 605-662.
21. The Exploit, 40
22. Network Power, 34
23. These companies offer a different array of services for different prices. Take, for example, 23andMe and Navigenics. At its inception, for $999, 23andMe provided a reading of 600,000 genetic polymorphisms and their relation to 11 diseases and 4 traits. The 23andMe service was designed to increasingly inform the consumer and maintain the consumer as an active participant in the community database. For $2500 and $250 per year thereafter, Navigenics provided a year's service that included a reading of nearly 2,000,000 polymorphisms and their relation to 18 diseases. They also offered genetic counsel, medical counsel and physician counsel. Today, 23andMe and Navigenics both provide personal health statistics on 23 traits (23andMe: 20 diseases and 3 traits; Navigenics 23 diseases). 23andMe also comments on 68 conditions whose origins are unresolved in the literature. Decode offers services similar to 23andMe for $985, while KNOME offers whole-genome sequencing for $350,000
24. M. Herper, Google's Genetic Start-Up, Forbes Magasizine, September 12, 2007, http://www.forbes.com/2007/09/12/genomicswojcicki-brin-biz-sci-cx_mh_0912_23andme.html.
25. (CBS Evening News, 2008)
26. R. Blakely, Search engine aims to Google your genes, Times, London, May 24 2007, http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article1832165.ece.
27. "Joining 23andMe is easy - simply log in to www.23andMe.com, read through the online consent form and purchase the service. Within a few days you'll receive a sample collection kit in the mail, with straightforward instructions on how to provide a sample. The kit includes a pre-paid, pre-addressed envelope into which you place the barcoded tube containing your saliva. Pop it into any FedEx drop-box and it arrives shortly at our contracted laboratory for processing. Upon receiving your sample, laboratory personnel will extract DNA from cells in your saliva. Your DNA is then processed on an Illumina( BeadChip, which reads more than 550,000 SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) plus a custom-designed set that analyzes more than 30,000 additional SNPs, chosen by 23andMe scientists for their scientific relevance. What this means is that the laboratory process reads nearly 600,000 specific points on your genome. An electronic data set is generated, encrypted and sent to 23andMe. Approximately 4-6 weeks after mailing back the sample, you will receive an email notification that your 23andMe genome profile is ready. Once logged in, you'll discover a whole new world of you." (23andMe official Web site, accessed September 17, 2008). The company also provides free access to a demo account that takes visitors through the genome of Gregor Mendel and his family.
28. "It has always been our goal to democratize genetic information by giving individuals access to their DNA. We are proud to announce another step toward that goal with the introduction of v2, our next-generation analytical platform, at the new price of $399. With v2 our customers will have access to an even more powerful set of SNPs to probe their unique genetic composition. And thanks to advances by Illumina, the provider of our genetic analysis technology, we are able to give you more information at a lower cost. By making genetic data more affordable and accessible, we hope this development will spur the evolution of personal genomics as a potent force not just in science but also in medicine and everyday life." (23andMe official Web site, accessed September 17, 2008).
29. 23andMe official Web site, "How it works: sharing and community" section, https://www.23andme.com/community/(accessed August 20, 2008).
30. (Rhys Blakely 2007)
31. ("The 7th Annual Year in Ideas," 2007)
32. 23andMe official Web site, "About" section, https://www.23andme.com/you/23andwe/about/(accessed September 17, 2008).
33. Of course there are functional problematics with 23andWe service. It is not clear whether scientific and medical community will want to work with a for-profit, Google-sponsored corporation. Right now 23andWe has partnered with the Parkinson's Institute of Sunnyvale, CA, but this is the only partnership that has been announced. There is also a question of numbers; in order for the service to yield results it will need to provide a large number of participants. The drop in price is probably an attempt to circumvent that last issue.
34. N. Rose and C. Novas (2005), Biological Citizenship, in Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, ed. Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier, Malden: Blackwell Publisher, pg. 439-63.
35. Biological Citizenship, in Global Assemblages, 450
36. M. Levina (2009), Regulation and Discipline in the Genomic Age: A consideration of differences between genetic engineering and genomics, in A Foucault for the 21st Century: Governmentality, Biopolitics and Discipline in the New Millennium, ed. Sam Binkley and Jorge Capetillo, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pg. 308-319.
37. Network Culture, 78
38. S.E. Brenner (2007), Common Sense for Our Genomes, Nature 449: 783-784.
39. A. Harmon (2008), Gene Map Becomes a Luxury Item, The New York Times, March 4, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/health/research/04geno.html.
40. Jason Bobe's blog site, Biocensorship for Biocentury?, July 8, 2008, http://thepersonalgenome.com/2008/07/biocensorshipforthe-biocentury (accessed October 30, 2008).
41. 23andMe official Web site, Research Revolution section, https://www.23andme.com/researchrevolution/overview/(accessed September 14, 2009).
42. S. Epstein (2007), Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
43. D. Boyd (2007), Apophenia Blog Essay, "Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace", June 24, 2007, http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html.