Donating genetic code to the public domain

(written by Lawrence Krubner, however indented passages are often quotes)

Interesting

Today, I published all of my known genetic data as open source and released all my rights to the data. My genome is now in the public domain. I believe that I’m the first person in the world to commit my genetic data into a decentralized source control system. The first reactions that I received when I told some of my friends that I was going to do this was a combination of shock and skepticism.

“Why would you do something like that?”
“Aren’t you afraid that somebody is going to use that against you?
“What if your healthcare provider got a hold of that? They’d love to look through it in order to deny you for some pre-existing condition!”
“Ugh, I’d never want to know that sort of stuff about myself!”
“What if somebody clones you!?”

I’ve thought long and hard about each of those questions and the many more that you ask yourself before publishing this sort of personal data. There are large privacy implications in doing this. However, speaking solely for myself, I think the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. I’ll explain my thought process behind each of those questions in a separate blog post.

However, the result of that thought process is that I’m releasing my genetic data today – that’s what I’d like to focus on in this blog post. So, let’s explore exactly what this data is and how I hope people that write software will use it.