The auditorium in the Quinpool Education Centre where the Youth Forum on Personal Genomics was held this morning is in need of some TLC, but it really must have been impressive in its prime. If the designers, builders, public funding bodies, and maintenance teams could have seen into the future to today's event and seen the state it was in, would they have done anything differently? Designed for obsolesence, used cheaper contstruction material, or beefed up the maintenance.
Now consider a personal genome scan.

These services provide a glimpse into your future and offer some predictions of what MAY happen to your health. That 'may' seemed to resonate with the students and the panel at the Forum so now that you've have the glimpse the question becomes what are you going to do with it.
At the front of the room for the Forum were Duance Guernsey a clincian and a researcher on a Genome Atlantic project, Julie Hathaway a genetic counselor, and Lynette Reid a bioethcist. They have all had access to my 23andME summary report and to my online account so they could take a good look at what personal genome services are all about. The panel all  seemed to agree that the website and science behind 23andME was good, was valid, and well referenced. They also seemed to agree that it opened the door to all sorts of social implications and as Duane Guernsey put it , "what you take from it is another matter".
The students did not hesitate to pick up on that.
For instance one student wondered if it was "morally right" to offer tests and information that are not 100% accurate and have a large degree of risk assessment and probability in the results. Good question.
Lynette Reid pointed out that when it comes to our health about the only 100% guarantee available is that some day we are going to die. Julie Hathaway wondered "what does a 40% chance mean to you". Julie is a genetic counselor and deals with families and individuals who have a high risk that comes from genetic factors. She also has a team of experts to work with. If you purchase a personal genotyping over the Internet, send in your swab, and find out there is a very high risk of cancer you have no support team. Issues such as this  still need some work and at least some of the impetus for that work will come from students like those from Citadel High School who were in the audience today.
They had already given this some thought and were in tune with the upside and downside of personal genotyping. They will be facing more pervasive testing in the future that is cheaper and more sophisticated.  The Quinpool Auditorium builders and funders didn't have that advantage of foresight, but everyone in the room today does. how we use it, how we refine, and how we debate is what we still have to figure out.
We can't , and probably shouldn't, reverse the trend towards more personal genome services. But events like the Genomie Atlantic forum, this blog, or our Facebook initiative can, as Genome Atlantics CEO Steve Armstrong put it, "enable the discussion".
So hats off to the students and staff at Citadel High for joining in.