Who "Owns" Your DNA?

 

Who Owns Your DNA?

Bibek Das

Genetics Fall 2025

I’ve always thought DNA was the most personal thing a person could have, it’s literally what makes us who we are. But after reading about how genetic data is collected and used, I started wondering: do we actually own our DNA once it’s been tested or stored somewhere? In the article “Data Ownership in Genomic Research Consortia” (Richardson et al., 2024), researchers talk about how once your genetic info gets uploaded into big databases for research, it’s kind of out of your hands. Scientists, companies, and labs might all have access to it. That’s wild to me. It means part of you could be floating around in a system, used for studies or even sold for research, without you ever knowing. On one hand, sharing DNA helps scientists make huge discoveries about health and disease, which is awesome. But on the other hand, it feels weird to lose control over something so personal.

Another article, “The Multidimensional Legal Nature of Personal Genomic Sequence Data” (Van Hale & Thaldar, 2022), made me realize that DNA isn’t just “ours” once it’s sequenced it can be seen as property, private information, or even intellectual data. That makes things super complicated. Like, if my DNA can tell scientists things about my relatives, does that mean they have some rights to it too? It reminds me of those stories where people upload their DNA to ancestry sites and end up identifying family members they didn’t even know existed or even helping solve crimes. It’s kind of amazing but also kind of scary. I think as genetics keeps advancing, we really need to make sure people understand what they’re signing up for when they share their DNA. Science moves fast, but we shouldn’t lose our privacy along the way.

Richardson, S., et al. (2024). Data ownership in genomic research consortia. Journal of Law & the Biosciences, 11(2), lsae024. https://doi.org/10.1093/jlb/lsae024

Van Hale, R., & Thaldar, D. (2022). The multidimensional legal nature of personal genomic sequence data. Frontiers in Genetics, 13, 997595. https://doi.org/10.3389/fgene.2022.997595