Genetics Startups to Arm Googlechondriacs

Genetics is the most powerful and misrepresented science of our time. It has the capacity to change the fate of entire species, but is more frequently misunderstood than a Yiddish speaker after a trip to the dentist.

Part of the problem is TV. It's a little known regulation that if your hard-bitten police/forensics/nosy old woman character doesn't miraculously identify someone through genetic records at least once an episode, your show gets reclassified from 'crime' to 'family comedy' and you spend the rest of your life writing about hilarious romantic misunderstandings. There's even a real world "DNA lab in a briefcase" for sale.

Another part is the amazing game of Chinese Whispers that is popular science reporting, where "identifying one of a group of factors that show correlation with tumor growth" morphs via "Cancer gene found!" into "Your family at risk from rogue death gene! Unicorns discovered in Buckingham palace for the fourth time this week!"

Contributing to this confusion is a plethora of genetics startup companies who figured "Why use revolutionary technology to improve the fate of all mankind when we can just get cash from the individuals directly?" Google "DNA test," and you'll find hordes of companies ready to prove who you did and didn't father, what diseases they will and won't have, and why they should be absolutely terrified of what happened to your maternal grandmother. They also frequently feature a mailing address a suspiciously large distance away from the organizations they claim to be endorsed by.

Doctors are already bracing themselves for the onslaught of Googlechondriac whiners armed with base-pair printouts. They were bad enough with access to medical encyclopedias they didn't have to "lift" and "exert effort to use", but give them a bunch of poorly understood gene tests and they'll be convinced they have Black Zambia Galloping Liver Degeneration before you can say "If you just exercised once a day standing up wouldn't be so difficult".

Of course the companies will defend themselves with the appropriate legalese, pages and pages of "[i]these tests are based on the same CNN headline you saw this morning and have not been proven to have anything but the vaguest relation to actual conditions[/i]" written in atom-sized fonts under a flashing banners screaming "DO YOU LOVE YOUR CHILDREN? THEN WHY HAVEN'T YOU CHECKED THEM FOR EVIL CANCER?"

No amount of warnings or caution will make any difference - Googlechondriacs live in bizarre fantasy world where medical school is five years of foam parties followed by a lecture on the best types of champagne to spend your consultation money on. After all, any idiot can quickly read a wikipedia page and a test result and find the solution! It's not as if the human body is the most complex device we've ever even pretended to understand, or as if the multitude of constellations of possible defects require years of training and education to identify.

I'm going to help the doctors. I'm going to invent a website that generates wikipedia articles with suitably impressive latinized symptoms. Then, the next time a patient whose main complaint is "you can't get Vitamin D from monitor radiation" complains about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and a sharp pain "as if my lymph nodes were peristalsing", the doctor can nod gravely and refer to a link from my website. There the patient can keenly memorise amazing scientific sounding advice like "[i]eatsnay lessay fattay[/i]" and "[i]donttus smokkus dumbass[/i]."

Posted by Luke McKinney.