{"id":39919,"date":"2011-04-21T23:49:03","date_gmt":"2011-04-22T07:49:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=11128"},"modified":"2011-04-21T23:49:03","modified_gmt":"2011-04-22T07:49:03","slug":"knowledge-of-one%e2%80%99s-own-mortality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2011\/04\/21\/knowledge-of-one%e2%80%99s-own-mortality\/","title":{"rendered":"Knowledge of one\u2019s own mortality"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In my persistent slog beating the drums for open genomics I&#8217;ve made the argument that <b>people should have the right to have more information about what their genetic code entails without the <i>necessary<\/i> and <i>mandatory<\/i> imprimatur  of professional assent.<\/b> Not only that, but I&#8217;d want to know myself. This is not a new found position which I&#8217;ve come to of late. I recall 17 years ago having a classroom discussion on this topic in the wake of the tests for <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Huntington's_disease\">Huntington&#8217;s disease<\/a>, and I was certainly pro-knowledge. That being said, there were conditionals. My position was that this sort of information <b>would be the most useful for the young, because they could determine the arc of their life with full knowledge of their probable time window.<\/b> A friend argued that ultimately you should always live every day as if it is your last day anyhow, so why get tested? This is great as a superficial talking point, but as a concrete matter our decisions are conditioned on the expected number of alloted days we have.<\/p>\n<p>A few years ago I heard about the story of the singer <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Bobby_Darin\">Bobby Darin<\/a>, and it made me think of those issues. From &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In my persistent slog beating the drums for open genomics I&#8217;ve made the argument that people should have the right to have more information about what their genetic code entails without the necessary and mandatory imprimatur  of professional asse&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,82,360],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-genetics","category-genomics","category-personal-genomics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39919"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39919\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40030,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39919\/revisions\/40030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}