Who Owns Your DNA?

Stanford Genetics Professor Michael Snyder’s book, Genomics & Personalized Medicine: What Everyone Needs to Know, is a work to be enjoyed on multiple levels. Designed for a broad audience, the book delivers a great deal of detail for the scientifically savvy while still providing a generalized overview for the yet-to-be-initiated. Although brief, the book is timely, having followed closely on the footsteps of President Obama’s recently announced multimillion-dollar push into personalized medicine (also known as precision medicine) and his related statements on individual ownership of DNA. This book is a concise overview for many of the stakeholders, particularly physicians, and for the general public as well. Snyder takes us on a whirlwind tour of many aspects of personalized medicine—from the basic science to the various relevant ‘omes, finally touching on the social and ethical issues associated with a personalized medicine future. Within the spectrum between a dry impersonal textbook and a popular science book, Snyder’s work falls in the middle. While it includes numerous technical figures and extensive scientific information, it doesn’t include references or footnotes. Instead, Snyder writes in an inviting voice. And, even while incorporating substantial technical information, he still sprinkles the complicated areas with his own research experiences to support the conclusions drawn; readers will likely appreciate many of the personal anecdotes, describing how Snyder himself has employed aspects of the science on himself. In relation to these anecdotes, it is worth mentioning that both authors of this Book Review have worked with Snyder in the past on some of these subjects and so were quite excited to see them summarized here. Even in this relatively compact package, Snyder provides succinct but coherent primers on personalized medicine, genomics, and cancer genetics. He follows with examples of more applications, including mystery disorders, complex diseases, prenatal care, pharmacogenomics, aging, and general health. It’s notable that Snyder’s book starts off with the classic ‘‘NIH genomics playbook’’ of cancer and rare disease; while these are probably of greatest interest to the general public, much of Snyder’s scientific accomplishments lie in other fields, such as functional genomics and proteomics—topics that he only touches on briefly later in the text. Moreover, the relatively minor discussion of proteomics is all the more surprising, as it is often seen as the key link connecting DNA to the more functional aspects of biology, though perhaps this is understandable in terms of the very few current applications of proteomics to the clinic. After the science introduction, Snyder switches gears to introduce the reader to associated topics, including wearables and big data. Finally, he provides an analysis of some of the thorny social issues