Inside STAT: In France, activists are fighting over lifting consumer genetic-testing ban 

(ERIC FEFERBERG/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES)

Scanning her résumé, you’d never guess Nathalie Jovanovic-Floricourt was an expert enabler of criminal activity. But when she isn’t working part-time for a bank, she’s busy being a self-styled fixer for black-market genetic tests. That’s because direct-to-consumer DNA kits are technically illegal in France — a ban that goes mostly unenforced. Now, as Jovanovic-Floricourt and her community of genetic genealogists are stepping up their campaign to get that legislation changed, they’ve come up against some strange adversaries. Most vocal, perhaps, is a geneticist who shares Jovanovic-Floricourt’s obsession with having French institutions protect the country’s health data, but who disagrees about the method. He doesn’t want the law to change, STAT's Eric Boodman reports, until France has its own homegrown genetic testing service — “like 23andMe, but better.” Read more here.