DNA took to the prime-time airwaves last week, when the acclaimed PBS program NOVA scienceNOW looked at the topic of personal genetic services. Navigenics was featured prominently in the segment. Dietrich Stephan,our co-founder and Chief Science Officer, sat down with host Neil deGrasse Tyson to explain how the process works. After Tyson chose to explore his own DNA using the Navigenics service, Elissa Levin, our Director of Genetic Counseling, helped Tyson understand his results.
The segment offers a balanced look at genetic services, addressing some of the broader critiques about genetic testing head-on. We are honored that a scientist such as deGrasse Tyson, a prominent astrophysicist, weighed those concerns and still saw the value of revealing his own DNA insights.
“I kind of think I’d rather know than not know,” deGrasse Tyson says in the segment, “because I can use that information to adjust how I might live going forward.”
At the end of the program, deGrasse Tyson offered more of his perspective on the value of understanding one’s own health-related DNA, even if that seems daunting at first:
“ Many people fear new information that might contain bad news beyond their control. But to fear bad news by hiding from it forfeits any opportunity to solve the problem.
Suppose the enterprise of science shunned bad news. We would never cure disease or mitigate disaster. We would crouch with our head in the sand, ceding our fate to forces we imagine to be beyond our control.
Take killer asteroids, for example. Without a space program, we could pretend they’re not there or we might run away from where they might strike. But I’d much rather learn all I can about these objects, and then figure out a way to deflect them.
Even worse than bad news, for some people, is uncertainty, not knowing something for sure makes them uncomfortable. They just have to have the answer, the exact answer.
But to the scientist, uncertainty is a call to the wild. That’s where data are in greatest need of improvement along the way to fully developed theories and experiments that have shed their shrouds of uncertainty.
For some cases, especially your health, you can actually influence the uncertainty yourself. If you wear a seatbelt, your chances of surviving a high-speed car accident are much higher than if you don’t. And if you exercise and eat well, you can stave off diseases that you might be genetically prone to contract.
So bad news, uncertainty? I say, bring it on. To a person engaged in discovery, all information is good, even when it’s bad.
And that is the cosmic perspective.”