Al-Jazeera America quotes Professor Hank Greely on the legal complications faced by genetics-based companies like 23andMe selling their customers'  information to pharmaceutical companies. 

In late January, President Barack Obama announced what some have called a moonshot.

The $215 million Precision Medicine Initiative seeks to transform the health care system to target therapies to patients according to their unique genetics and environment.

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Hank Greely, a Stanford law professor who studies biomedical ethics, said that 23andMe customers might not have understood what they were agreeing to when they read the company’s consent form.

“It says, ‘I’m willing to let my data be shared for research into disease,’” he said. “It doesn't say, ‘I’m willing to let you sell my data to Pfizer for $200 million.’”