Human Longevity Study Sparks Questions About Face Prediction Claims, Data Sharing, Role Of Preprints

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Publish Date:
September 8, 2017
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GenomeWeb
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Summary

A study published by Human Longevity this week claims that it is possible to identify individuals based in part on predictions of their faces from their whole-genome sequencing data, but a number of researchers have since questioned those findings.

The reaction following the publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was swift. A number of researchers took to Twitter to voice their concerns, among them Yaniv Erlich, an assistant professor in computer science at Columbia University and chief science officer of MyHeritage, who also posted a critique of the paper to the preprint server BioRxiv the day after the study appeared.

Hank Greely, director of the Center for Law and Biosciences at Stanford University, said that “of all the genetic privacy issues out there, genomic facial reconstruction is quite low on my list — certainly now and probably forever.”

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