The Power of Prediction: How Personal Genomics became a Policy Challenge

This paper discusses how online genome-wide DNA tests that are marketed direct-to-consumer (DTC) have become policy challenges in many European and North American countries despite the small number of people who have taken such tests world-wide. It is argued that interpretive approaches are uniquely placed to help us understand the deeper challenge to the very categories underpinning the delivery of medical care that online personal genomics (PG) services seem to pose. For example, these online tests symbolise the part-reversal of the hierarchy between those traditionally been seen as 'experts' and 'lay people', and the blurring of the boundaries between the medical and the non-medical. Ultimately, the employment of an interpretive approach, which focuses on how actors use and challenge labels, classifications, and categories, shows that the controversy over DTC genome tests concerns the question of who should be allowed to make authoritative predictions about other people's lives a core statement about the distribution of power. It is a redistribution of power in this respect that seems to necessitate policy change in the field of PG.