Navigenics is collaborating with the Mayo Clinic on a study now underway to see whether learning about their genomic risks changes users’ behavior. But what’s certain is that consumer genomics is going to change the behavior of the medical community. Sequencing your entire genome isn’t down to pennies yet—at the moment it retails for $350,000. But nobody doubts that the price will drop to more like $1,000 within five years. Cheaper, more widespread sequencing means that increasingly rare but sometimes significant SNPs stand to be unearthed, leaving a growing mountain of genetic data tapping its foot to be interpreted.

Is the medical community ready to deal with the inevitable torrent of partially digested genomic-scan data that will soon be begging for interpretation? Virginia Thurston, Foroud’s colleague at Indiana University, recently published a study suggesting otherwise. Thurston, the medical school’s medical-genetics program course director, suspects schools are producing primary physicians who may lack basic skills such as taking family histories or explaining implications for patients’ families, and who may be fuzzy on essential principles of genetics.

In all, there are only between 3,000 and 4,000 total board-certified genetics specialists in the United States, according to Thurston—a shortfall unlikely to be relieved anytime soon, because the field isn’t lucrative. A dermatologist sees three or four patients per hour and performs lots of procedures. A genetics specialist spends an hour to an hour and a half talking to patients and their families—hardly the formula for sizeable reimbursements.

Plus, virtually all practicing specialists’ experience and training is restricted to single-gene traits. Few of them have expertise in the complexities of low-penetrance gene variants churned up by genome scans, says Jonathan Holt, a medical geneticist and Stanford University clinical instructor. Holt recently decided to start his own company, Holistic Genomics, to counsel “walk-ins”—spillovers from genetic testing by 23andme and other consumer-genomics outfits, such as Iceland-based DeCodeMe, that proclaim their genome scans are “for information purposes only” and offer no genetic-counseling follow-up.

For their part, consumer-genomics companies say they are working hard to train the medical community by, for example, providing good online materials for users and more-detailed printouts they can bring to primary physicians.

Navigenics has funded the construction by an independent provider, Medscape, of a continuing medical education course for primary-care physicians about genomics and what it could mean for their practice. “We thought it was important to have a third party develop it, to ensure that it would be for the pure benefit of physicians,” says Levin. The online course was first offered in late February. By mid-April, more than 2,000 physicians had already completed it.

It’s still early days for consumer genomics. “We are very clear that our test is definitely not for everybody,” says 23andme’s Wojcicki. “People who aren’t interested in preventive medicine, who don’t want to know their genetic information, shouldn’t get tested. It’s a personal choice. But people should have that choice.”

Navigenics user Perry Pickert, 32, accepts that his genomic-scan findings, which showed him at below-average genetic risk for the colon cancer his father had recovered from and the prostate cancer his grandfather had died of, are subject to alteration by new findings. “This isn’t a Bible,” Pickert says. “I’m not closing my eyes.”

Bruce Goldman is a San Francisco-based science writer and futurist whose work has been published in The Journal of Life Sciences, Nature, Science, New Scientist, The Los Angeles Times, The Journal of the American Cancer Institute, and, most recently, Nature Reports Stem Cells. He is the co-author of two books about how technology is shaping our destiny.