Is it ethical to publish your baby’s genome?

That's what a reader below asks. To some extent I wondered this when Dan MacArthur and Ilana Fisher put their genotypes out there. They have a son, and so now you can generate a likely matrix of risks for Tobias MacArthur since you have his parents' genotypes. Since he's only a bit over a year old I doubt anyone could obtain his consent in the matter. But this is a far cry from putting Tobias' genotype out there without asking him. I suspect that genetic counselors would want to gather together a lynch mob for the first parents that did this. But then again, this is a quantitative issue, not a qualitative one. Genetic risks are by and large probabilistic even if you know someone's genotype. Instead of having to generate a distribution of outcomes from their parents you have the specific pairs of alleles. So you get a more ...