Genetic data banks amassed by private companies don't necessarily have to follow the same regulations regarding access to their data that federally funded researchers do. And a recent proposal to change consent regulations for human research may make it cheaper for private companies to collect and use this data than public ones.
As bioethicists (myself included) have warned, we need to pay attention to concerns about how these private genetic data banks are used and accessed before we enable a system where the future of public genetic research lies in private hands.
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