Cross posted from Nature’s The Great Beyond blog.
A controversial program at the University of California, Berkeley, inviting incoming freshmen and transfer students to receive a personal analysis of three genetic variants in their DNA cannot proceed as planned, the state public health department told university officials yesterday.
At a late afternoon meeting yesterday, the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) said that the genetic information that participating students would receive constitutes clinical testing, and therefore can’t be released to students outside of a clinical setting. Program organizers, however, argue that the testing is educational, not clinical.
“The CDPH was firm in its stance about our not being allowed to return test results to individual students and although we disagree, we will follow their guidance and modify our program accordingly,” Mark Shlissel, dean of biological sciences and one of the program’s organizers, wrote in an email to Nature today.