Navigenics, the Redwood Shores, CA company that I read about in Technology Review’s Jan/Feb 2008 issue brought me back to the beautiful dilemmas of placebo drugs, Matrix and Minority Report.

Navigenics is the leading developer of a genetics test that has the potential to tell its customers the probability of getting a heart attack or Alzheimer’s diseas in the next 20 years. It looks fairly inspiring at the face value but the word in bold changes everything, I guess.

I will start with the ‘99 blockbuster Matrix. In one scene where Neo meets Oracle, there is a beautifully told story of a dilemma. The old oracle tells Neo not to feel sorry about the vase. Surprised to hear it, Neo turns back to see where the vase is, and his elbow hits the vase to make it fall and crack. And the Oracle asks, “If I hadn’t told you about the vase, would that vase got broken?”

A similar beautifully depicted dilemma was present in Spielberg’s Minority Report. Tom Cruise plays an agent working for D.C Pre-crime department. Thanks to the gifted oracles, homicides can be seen before they occur in real time, and Tom Cruise’s team tries to reach the crime scene before the countdown reaches to zero. As a result, they arrest the suspect before he commits the crime itself. Would that make the suspect guilty?

Enough for movies and Hollywood. I just wanted to make my point about Navigenics a bit stronger. I grew up with the stories of placebo drug effects, with which patients that receives fake medicines show a significant signal of recovery, just because they think the drug they take is proven effective. Today, Navigenics, with its huge potential on the positive side, may also bring a dangerous side effect to the lives of the patients.

Let’s consider a John Doe, at his forties, rich enough to buy a 2.500US$ genetics test from Navigenics. Thanks to his test, Navigenics experts pulls out a diagnostics map of John Doe, with specific vulnerability probabilities to many of today’s fatal diseases. Based on that probability report, experts suggest a dietary and/or medicine plan to John Doe. What Navigenics expects is that John Doe becomes energized to beat his potential vulnerability and commits to the multi-year diet and medicine plan that may help him to overcome his genes’ weaknesses. What Navigenics ignore, in my opinion, is that people tend to give in more frequently than they withstand. What would happen if John Doe is told that he has a 25% probability to have a heart attack in the next 10 years and John Doe loses his faith and excitiment for life. And then, how can we be sure that the reason of him having a heart-attack in 2018 is his genes, but not his mind that previously has shown the significance of human psychology in placebo drug trials.

With the pragmatic sense of US government officials, Navigenics managers can claim that, on average, they may be doing more good than bad. But even if this probability calculations causes 1 single person to live a more pessimistic life after the tests, is it an expandable life of one single life for the good of many others?

Further reading can be found in VentureBeat and Wall Street Journal.