A number of top scientists have volunteered to have their DNA made public in order kick start a project that hopes to eventually have more than 100,000 genetic profiles on the internet.

They include Steven Pinker, the prominent Harvard University psychologist and author, Esther Dyson, a trainee astronaut and Misha Angrist, an assistant professor at Duke University..

They have each donated a piece of skin to the project at Harvard University and agreed to have the results posted on the internet.

The three are among the first 10 volunteers in the Personal Genome Project, a study at Harvard University Medical School aimed at challenging the conventional wisdom that the secrets of our genes are best kept to ourselves.

The goal of the project is to speed medical research by dispensing with the elaborate precautions traditionally taken to protect the privacy of human subjects.

The more genetic information can be made open and publicly available, nearly everyone agrees, the faster research will progress.

They have volunteered to have their genetic information posted on the internet along with photographs, their disease histories, allergies, medications, ethnic backgrounds and a trove of other traits, called phenotypes, from food preferences to television viewing habits

Researchers admit that the project is as much a social experiment as a scientific one, and say that the ramifications of having one’s genetic information in the public eye are not yet known.

American law prohibits health insurers and employers from discriminating against individuals on the basis of their genetic profile. But any one of the PGP 10 could be denied life insurance, long-term care insurance or disability insurance, with no legal penalty.

“We don’t yet know the consequences of having one’s genome out in the open,” said Dr George Church, a human geneticist at Harvard who is the project’s leader and one of its subjects. “But it’s worth exploring.”

The project required the first 10 participants to have extensive knowledge of genetics to ensure that they understood what conclusions could be drawn from their online genetic profiles.

There is the matter of potential recrimination – from siblings, parents and children who share half of the participants’ genes and did not necessarily agree to display them in public.

Prospective participants are advised to consult with first-degree relatives, but except for identical twins, their consent is not required. Some volunteers are worried about their hurting their teenagers’ dating prospects.

“A potential boyfriend could look at my genome and say, ‘I don’t know if this relationship is meant to be,’ ” said John Halamka, a participant and the chief information officer of Harvard Medical School, who has a 15-year-old daughter. (His daughter, he said, told him that if a suitor did that, “I wouldn’t want them as a boyfriend anyway.”)

Luckily it appears the first volunteers are a healthy group, and the information posted so far doesn’t reveal any devastating health problems.

The participants are more likely to learn that they are at a modestly increased risk of some common diseases. John Halamka, chief information officer at Harvard Medical School, got an early peek at his genomic information and discovered that he has double the average risk of obesity.

“Even with this imperfect screening tool, if someone had told me 10 years ago I was at twice the risk of obesity, I would have stopped the cheeseburger, doughnut, and two lattes a day habit much earlier,” says Halamka.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk, Richard Alleyne