With the FDA’s warning letter to 23andMe and follow-up articles taking news networks by storm, ASU law professor, Gary Marchant weighed in on the issue in an article for Slate entitled The FDA Could Set Personal Genetics Rights Back Decades. In his commentary, Marchant claims that the FDA’s directive to 23andMe to cease marketing its genetic tests “is a shortsighted, heavy-handed, double-standard act of paternalism,” further challenging that its warning letter is part of the FDA’s concerted effort to eradicate the right of consumers to gain access to their own genetic information within the direct-to-consumer scheme. Marchant argues that people should have a right to access their own data through service providers such as 23andMe and that FDA’s archaic and ill-suited regulatory system as applied to home genetic testing has effectively put a significant part of that data out of consumers’ reach – for the foreseeable future.
