Dans le flot de ses prédictions pour 2030, le très technophile magazine en ligne Wired s’inquiète des conséquences du déluge de données génétiques attendues pour les prochaines années. Pour éviter le “panoptique génétique”, genetic panopticon, image foucaldienne d’une surveillance individuelle généralisée, et la fin de la vie privée génétique, il serait urgent de réfléchir à un encadrement législatif adéquat. 

“If you think you’re currently living in the age of Big DNA, think again. The next decade will see a more than hundredfold boom in the world’s output of human genetic data. The drop in sequencing costs is shifting DNA testing out of the research lab and into mainstream medical practice. Population-based sequencing projects in more than a dozen countries, including the US, are expected to produce 60 million genomes by 2025. By 2030, China hopes to add another 100 million from its own precision medicine initiative. The impact is hard to even imagine. To date, only about a million people have had their whole genomes sequenced. And it’s not a very diverse cohort. More data from all over the globe will allow for more powerful, fine-grained analyses of how genes shape health and behavior. Very large genetic data sets are ideal for a new technique called Mendelian randomization, which mimics clinical trials, allowing researchers to tease apart causes and correlations. Bigger samples will also make it possible to forecast even complex traits—like height or susceptibility to heart disease—from DNA. A world so saturated with genetic data will come with its own risks. The emergence of genetic surveillance states and the end of genetic privacy loom. Technical advances in encrypting genomes may help ameliorate some of those threats. But new laws will need to keep the risks and benefits of so much genetic knowledge in balance” alerte Megan Molteni, l’auteur de l’article.