A panel that advises the U.S. government on health and genetics met for the final time yesterday, amid questions surrounding its dissolution as well as concerns that its absence will be missed at a time when genetics is set to flood into healthcare.

“I am a bit puzzled about the decision,” says James Evans, a medical geneticist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a member of the Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Genetics, Health and Society (SACGHS), which was created in 2003 to address issues such as genetic discrimination, gene patenting and genetic testing.

He and other SACGHS members unexpectedly received word late last month that this week’s meeting in Bethesda, Maryland would be its last and that the committee’s charter would be extended for only the six months needed to complete a final report on genetic education. An early-stage examination of the impacts of whole genome sequencing technology will be shelved, Evans says.

John Burklow, a spokesman for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), says Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, and NIH director Francis Collins decided to end SACGHS because it had “fulfilled its charge” and that other government bodies will carry its mantle for genetics and health policy issues. Cost was also cited as a reason for ending SACGHS’ charter, says the committee’s chair Steven Teutsch, Chief Science Officer at the LA Country Department of Public Health.

The committee was an early and vocal advocate for the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act (GINA), which bars insurers and employers from discriminating based on genetic information and became law in 2008. SACGHS was also among the first to voice concerns over the burgeoning field of director-to-consumer (DTC) genetics testing, and the Food and Drug Administration is now drafting industry regulations.

Despite these successes, current and former committee members say that now is hardly the time to dissolve SACGHS.

GINA may be a done deal, but the scope of DTC genetic testing regulations are still fluid, while genetic privacy and implementing genetics into everyday healthcare are far from abstract, says Evans. “To disband an advisory committee at this juncture with the widely acknowledged looming challenges that exist seems a little like the suggestion back in the 19th century to close the patent office since it had done its job,” he says.

“I’m failing to see the logic on pulling the plug on something so focused on these issues,” says Daniel Vorhaus, a biotechnology lawyer at Robinson, Bradshow and Hinson in Charlotte, North Carolina, who closely follows the committee.

Huntington Willard, a geneticist at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and a former SACGHS member, doubts that the committee’s agenda will fall off the government’s radar, particularly with former Human Genome Project leader Francis Collins now installed as NIH director.

Willard also acknowledges that a single group may no longer be up to the task of overseeing the increasingly crowded intersection of healthcare and genetics. “This is the 5000-foot view, and now there’s a really a need to drill down to sea level on each one of the issues,” he says.

However, Willard worries that without a group like SACGHS pushing genetics policy, the federal government will become increasingly reactive in responding to such issues. The FDA, for instance, only stepped into regulate direct-to-consumer genetics firms after news that one firm would begin selling tests at a chain of drug stores. “What I’m failing to see from the outside looking in is any indication that there is an overall, integrated strategy,” he says.