Freshmen Specimen

The school year at the University of California, Berkeley, began with a swab. In a program called Bring Your Genes to Cal, 5,500 incoming freshmen were asked to provide samples of their saliva in an experiment designed to bring the student body together in the same manner that reading To Kill a Mockingbird might have in the past. The more than 700 students who responded had their DNA analyzed in Berkeley's (uncertified) labs, assessed for susceptibility to alcoholism, lactose intolerance and relative metabolism of folic acid. The exercise provoked an international debate about the ethics of the assignment. Ultimately, the California Department of Public Health barred the university from dispensing individual profiles on the grounds that genetic analysis is correlative only and is neither necessarily predictive nor diagnostic at this point. A collective comparison of the class's genetic data was permitted, however, and circulated in "anonymized" form at orientation.

There are several reasons that Berkeley's undertaking should give us pause. The first and most obvious is that of privacy: this information reveals more than we can yet interpret at the...