Access

Perspective

Nature Reviews Genetics 9, 406–411 (1 May 2008) | doi:10.1038/nrg2360

From genetic privacy to open consent

Jeantine E. Lunshof , Ruth Chadwick , Daniel B. Vorhaus & George M. Church

Recent advances in high-throughput genomic technologies are showing concrete results in the form of an increasing number of genome-wide association studies and in the publication of comprehensive individual genome–phenome data sets. As a consequence of this flood of information the established concepts of research ethics are stretched to their limits, and issues of privacy, confidentiality and consent for research are being re-examined. Here, we show the feasibility of the co-development of scientific innovation and ethics, using the open-consent framework that was implemented in the Personal Genome Project as an example.