This is Scientific American 60 Second Science.

I'm Cynthia Graber.

Got a minute?

Some people donate their bodies to medical science upon their deaths so that medical students

can learn anatomy. Now researchers have come up

with new ways that individuals can contribute their bodily information to

medicine while they're still alive. A nonprofit at Harvard called the

Personal Genome Project lets you share your genome sequence

and health data for the use of researchers around the world.

And scientists at Harvard, NYU, and UC San Diego have teamed up to spin off what they're

calling the Open Humans Network.

This new venture has developed two projects so far.

The first, called American Gut, allows you to contribute data about your gut microbiome

a hot topic of research.

The second, called Go Viral,

lets you donate easy to collect specimens

when you have the flu or flu-like symptoms.

The goal is to greatly expand existing medical databases and to share them to speed up

understanding of diseases and development of treatments. Privacy is certainly an

issue. The project has built-in security measures, but participants are

alerted about potential risks in sharing such information.

There's been a decline in recent years of volunteers for medical studies.

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