Parents Shouldn't Post Their Child's DNA Online -- Keep It Private

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Hi. I'm Art Caplan. I'm at the NYU School of Medicine in New York City. I run the Division of Medical Ethics there. I want to talk today about a practice that I think doctors should be trying to discourage, which is having parents put information about their kids' DNA online on public sites.

You might say, who would do that? Increasingly, many parents are doing it. I'll give you an example that was reported in the media recently. A mom had kids aged 7 and 10 years old. She knew she had a mutation—not the disease—but a risk factor for a particular Parkinson-like disease, and she wanted to see if the kids had it.

She used the commercial genetic testing company 23andMe to get the test done. The results came back and said at least one of the kids had inherited the mutation. I'm not sure what she did with that information, but she became aware that at least one of the kids was at risk. I don't know if it was a huge risk, but there was some risk of getting this Parkinson-like disease.

The story might have ended there, except then the mom remembered that she'd heard from friends and neighbors that sometimes you can find long-lost relatives if you put your DNA on Facebook or on some of these public genetic information sharing sites.