Brain scanning vs personal genomics

Personal genomics companies like 23andMe, deCODEme and Navigenics have taken substantial media flak recently over their limited ability to make useful disease risk predictions based on genome scan data.

There's certainly some truth to that accusation, but all three of these companies have been generally good at conveying this uncertainty to their customers. In particular, I've been amazed by the tendency of deCODEme to play down the usefulness of their tests in terms of disease prediction. I've previously mentioned deCODE's Kari Stephansson's admission at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory that deCODEme is "marketing these tests without any claim that they will impact on people's lives"; a couple of weeks ago I attended a seminar on personal genomics in Cambridge, UK, where deCODEme's Agnar Helgason volunteered that "what we can offer at the moment is pretty meagre". Navigenics and 23andMe tend to avoid such frank admissions, but their predictions are still very carefully phrased in statistical terms.

In any case, the accuracy of predictions based on personal genomics starts to look much more impressive when it's compared to some of the other 'science-based' prediction industries out there. A recent article in Wired has a fairly scathing review of one such field: the use of functional brain scans to predict risks of mental illness, personality traits, dishonesty, political views and consumer behaviour.

Given the $3,300 price tag for one of the services on offer (from a company that is "dedicated to optimizing the brain-life connection in our patients and people worldwide", according to their website), this is a pretty expensive piece of foolishness. No doubt some patients benefit from the service, but it's likely that they would have gained just as much from a visit to a good counsellor without the fancy brain scans, at a small fraction of the cost.

Long-term readers will know that I don't recommend current genome scans - my suggestion is that potential customers save their money for a few years, by which time large-scale sequencing will be affordable, and we will know much more about disease-associated genetic variants - but if I had to pick a fancy technology to waste my money on I'd go with a genome scan over a brain scan any day.

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