In 1994, Mary Sue Kelly, who lives on a boat near Half Moon Bay, California, was diagnosed with breast cancer. Some 14 years later, she’s now well past the crucial 10-year survival mark. The treatment—mastectomy followed by standard chemotherapy—was successful. But for many years, Kelly, now 63 years old, remained unnerved. It was not so much by the implications that her contracting the disease would have for her own health, but rather by what her oncologist told her. “This has implications for your family,” he said—an ominous reference to possible heritable factors lurking in Kelly’s genome. “It just hit me in the stomach,” she recalls. “I was prepared to die, but my children—it just crushed me to think it could happen to one of them.”

So when a comprehensive test for global genetic-risk factors became available a few months ago, she did what a growing number of patients curious about their disease potential are doing these days: She took the test, offered by a just-launched company named Navigenics. The test came back with some reassuring news: She was actually below the national average for known genetic factors predisposing women to breast cancer.

“Folks who live in boats are not, by and large, people of the future,” Kelly says. But she’s fascinated by the new genomics. “Wouldn’t you want to know your blood pressure? Wouldn’t you want to know you have four cavities? I believe it’s the thing of the future. I suspect my grandchildren will have DNA information on their driver’s licenses.”

It looks as if the future Kelly foresees will soon be upon us. Companies are now offering whole-genome scans—probing entire collections of our genes for minuscule person-to-person differences at particular locations along the vast stretches of DNA that comprise our genes. These differences distinguish us from one another, tell us about our ancestral heritage, and influence our susceptibility to disease. At least one consumer-genomics company, Navigenics, offers follow-on genetic counseling services to explain to users what their results mean. And some critics are voicing doubts as to whether anybody really knows what they mean in these early days of genomic science.

As the consumer-genomics industry self-assembles before our eyes, the Federal government is doing its best to keep up. In April, Congress enacted The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, a law protecting individuals against discrimination by insurance companies based on genetic test results, encouraging consumers’ use of such tests. “It has cleared the way for consumers to have access to their genetic information while safeguarding it from abuse, or misuse,” says Sara Katsanis, genetics policy analyst for the Genomics and Public Policy Center (GPPC), a Washington, D.C.-based Johns Hopkins affiliate. “This should also empower the companies themselves.”