Voting currently places Jon ahead by a whopping 33%. If this early headstart is anything to go by, we can look forward to Jon scraping the inside of his cheeks with the special deCODE buccal swab kit.

While I suspect most of the 40 or so hits that have come to the page so far are people who know Jon and me, I thought it would be useful to give a brief introduction about why I personally am interested in having someone deCODEd.

I am not really bio-curious. I dropped biology in Grade 11 because it was too ‘wet’ and ’sticky’. Since then, I’ve warmed up to it a bit more, but it still isn’t in my main areas of interest.

The reason I am interested in deCODEme is not so much about the technoscientific side of things, but in the ways that people view and understand deCODEme. What kinds of expectations do people have for deCODEme? Are they interested in the medical information? Do they want to find out where their ancestors came from? Do they want to get into personal genomics before anyone else?

The other main reason I’m curious about deCODEme is the way they choose to frame and present themselves and their genetic profiling services. What do they promise to provide? What kinds of caveats do they state? I think it’ll be interesting to look for signs of how they are reading and attempting to respond to what they believe are the expectations of their clientele.

I tend (especially lately) to try and find the ‘norm’ or ‘baseline’ that is assumed, especially when they involve things like race and ethnicity, so the third area that I’m interested in is how ideas like ‘race’, ‘ethnicity’ or ‘heritage’ are used within the context of personal genetic profiling. This is a big area, and should be fun.

I’d like to end by saying: vote for Jon.