Whoa. Wait a minute, Doc. Are you trying to tell me that my mother has got the hots for me? This is not what Elon Musk said when President Trump announced he was the fertilization president, though the confusion is understandable. This is a line said by Michael J. Fox in the movie Back to the Future. He is on my mind because of the recent expansion of his amazing Parkinson’s research work. Part of that work is a study of the biological data – the “genetic architecture” of Parkinson’s Disease – that can help explain why people are afflicted with the condition. In the One Thoughtful Paragraph below, I explain why biological data is a hot topic this week.
First, highlights from this week’s news that is also about data:
- U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Commerce Committee Ranking Member Maria Cantwell (D-WA) sent a letter asking the FTC to investigate companies that collect neural data by detecting and interpreting brain activity through external devices, saying this type of information is “strategically sensitive.”
- The Digital Medicine Society (DiMe) is partnering with academic medical centers and digital health companies to understand how they can use data from consumer wearable devices to prevent relapse in patients with opioid use disorder.
- According to Verizon‘s 2025 Data Breach Investigations report, the healthcare sector faced 1,710 security incidents and 1,542 confirmed data breaches from November 2023 to October 2024.
- Similarly, healthcare organizations faced a 21% rise in ransomware attacks in 2024, according to a report published by cybersecurity firm NCC Group.
In one of John Mulaney’s more hilarious comedy routines, he explains how Back to the Future is a movie about a high school kid who’s best friend is a disgraced nuclear physicist that has to make his parents kiss on their first date or he will never be born. This – naturally — brings us to genomic data, the DNA bits that come from our parents. Because we are not in the Back to the Future movie, the only way we know about these bits is if we purchase 23andMe kits. As it turns out, there is some nervousness that bad actors will get a hold of our 23andMe data now that the company is in bankruptcy. Members of Congress, representing both parties from the House and Senate, are asking the FTC and DOJ to take precautions to protect Americans’ genomic information collected by 23andMe, particularly because of the risk of foreign adversaries accessing this data. But general nervousness about the safety of genetic data isn’t just about 23andMe. On April 11, I wrote about the National Commission for Emerging Biotechnology’s warning that China is increasingly interested in this type of information. And after that report came out, the NIH issued a notice clarifying that generative AI models can only access human genomic data if they adhere to the Genomic Data Sharing Policy (whatever that means — more on that here). And yet – genomic data is supposedly the key to fixing everything. Just this week, UPMC launched a platform that uses genomic sequencing to identify infectious disease strands to stop the spread, which can be used by hospitals in case of another pandemic. Are we able to handle this genomic-focused future? As Michael J. Fox says in Back to the Future, “I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet. But your kids are gonna love it.”
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