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“Imagine you have a brick of gold and you want to make a necklace out of it. I’m a jeweler, but you don’t trust me to not take the gold and run away,” Erlich said. “What you do instead is place the brick in a box, and you put all the equipment I need to make the necklace inside the box, and then you lock the box. From there, I make the necklace, give the box back to you, you pay me, then you open it and you get your necklace.”Genomic homomorphic encryption would work the same way. A genome would be encrypted, and all the tools needed to analyze it would be altered to work on this encrypted genome. A scientist would analyze it for you, send it back, and you’d decrypt it.“As a researcher, when I look at the results myself, I see gibberish, cypher text. I have no idea what your risk for heart disease is,” he said. “But then you have the key, you decrypt it, and you know.”The problem, at least for the moment, is that it takes a ridiculous amount of computing power to encrypt an entire genome, and all of the genetic analytical tools we’ve developed so far would have to be revamped to work with homomorphic encryption. It’s definitely not ready for widespread use, but at the moment, it’s one of the most promising things we’ve got.“It’s not there yet,” White said. “It’s promising, but my personal opinion is that homomorphic encryption for genomic data is still years away from being practical.”Even once it's practical, it'll take lobbying and legislation to require the government to do it. But at least someone is working on the technology to make genetic encryption a possibility.“This is still in its infancy, but we’re looking to the future," Erlich said. "Some people say ‘I don’t care about my genetic privacy.’ I don’t think that’s going to stay the case.”Some people say ‘I don’t care about my genetic privacy.’ I don’t think that’s going to stay the case.