Both the New York Times and the Boston Globe report on an initiative by a group of leading researchers in genetics and beyond to push the boundaries of privacy by making their complete genome data available to the world.

From the NYT:

“The goal of the project, which hopes to expand to 100,000 participants, is to speed medical research by dispensing with the elaborate precautions traditionally taken to protect the privacy of human subjects.”

The Personal Genome Project is headed by George Church, a professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and a leader in the field of genome sequencing. Curiously enough, Church “required the first 10 participants to demonstrate the equivalent of a master’s degree in genetics” to be sure that they are aware of the risks and benefits of revealing their genetic code. Church’s genetic code, and that of the other nine participants (including prominent Harvard psychologist Stephen Pinker and Esther Dyson, a technology venture capitalist) will soon be made available at a public website, personalgenomes.org.

If you had the opportunity to find out what your genome holds, would you take it? Would you let others in on the secret? The benefit to science of revealing individual’s genetic code will become clear in the years to come, but is it necessary to publicly associate the name with the genes?