involved 339.inv.0 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

The Story of My I-Search

Because I was aware of newspaper reports relating to regulatory issues in the genetic testing industry, I felt comfortable starting with Google. In the alternative, as a subscriber I have access to the on-line archives of both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal (I haven’t found the Patriot-News’ archives to be thorough or user-friendly) so I was prepared to switch the beginning of my search to those databases as necessary.

A Google search gave me the link to the articles I recalled, and another Google search gave me the names of several people to consider contacting for an interview relating to my issue; however, my efforts at securing an interviewee were a disappointment as people professed to be were unavailable. While the Google searches apprised me of some additional important issues (for example, it reminded me of concerns relating to insurance-discrimination/privacy), it didn’t give me the depth of information that was necessary to consider how accurate the predictions based on the test results were. As such, as our Library’s on-line database is easy to use, I switched and starting using those resources.

In the event, three articles ordered by our Library for me provided me with – for these purposes – a reasonable amount of information relating to the predictions. One article was co-authored by J. Craig Venter (the man involved in the private-company sequencing of the human genome) and, in its second paragraph, revealed its industry-friendly bias: