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The Archon Genomics X Prize contest has been declared for January 2013. Larry Kedes and Grant Campany explain the selection of centenarian genomes for the contest and provide the rules by which the contestants will be judged.
Fostering scientific progress and ensuring that the community has access to human exome data can be difficult to do when faced with the divergent interests of patients, data generators, data funders and potential data users. We support the archiving of sensitive datasets in secure repositories with appropriate mechanisms in place to control access.
The US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) is proposing to enhance federal regulation intended to protect human research subjects, in particular to increase measures aimed at security of personal data. Since the ethical review process is partially based on respect for people and their autonomy, harmonization of these rules will be a process of convincing individuals and their states to accept uniform standards that give enough privacy but do not lock away personal data from either research participants or researchers.
Although Nature Genetics generally urges authors to keep their claims within the research arena, basic research occasionally turns up results that are ready for immediate application. In these cases we aim to assign some peer referees familiar with the needs of policy makers and to provide accompanying commentary that puts the research into an appropriate societal perspective.