Yes indeed. #jumpthesharkmoments

Yes, I agree totally. Having these results floating around uninterpreted by someone who really knows the science is just a recipe for silliness, but also some real harm could come if people jump to conclusions.

At one point, our obstetrician ordered up a "routine genetic screening" while my kid was in utero. I guess he was looking for Downs or something where the markers are well-known. What came back was a report of a marker - a "backwards" chromosome, and a cryptic one-liner about possible dire stuff and a reference to an academic paper on which the marker identification was based. Our obstetrician, a very experienced guy, couldn't tell us anything about what dire stuff we might be facing, or what the probability was, or what it all meant. He noted that according to the paper, if one of the parents had the same marker and was fine, then the probability was very high that the marker was benign. We also contacted the geneticist who performed the test for more information and counseling, and she had no further information about the meaning of the results. So we tested both of us parents (not cheap!) and mine came back with the same marker. Big sigh of relief -- no, no particular reason to consider aborting the fetus.

In the interim, we tracked down the researcher who wrote the original paper. Google and email are wonderful things. The researcher turned out to be a nice post-doc at Columbia Presbyterian. She couldn't tell us what dire consequences we might be facing or their probabilities, either. I don't think she'd ever been anywhere near a clinical situation. She had only published a paper noting the correlation and indicating that this might be a fruitful area for further research. She was quite surprised that a commercial genetic testing company was using her results as the basis for a test used for routine genetic screening.

This is very young science, folks. This is just one tiny example, and there are a lot of genes! It's going to take decades to sort through all the data we already have to figure out what it means. Doing this over the counter now is really jumping the gun.

The point of having the committee was so that the various corporations who wanted to profit from having a standard could fight it out "in committee" and thus lessen the amount of effort the FCC commissioners would have to put into resolving the squabble.

Another reason to have the committee was to put a bit of distance between the warring corporations and the FCC. After all, if there's going to be bribing and backroom deal-making going on, isn't it better that the FCC itself was not the body taking the bribes?