BOSTON -- Is Esther Dyson, the technology venture capitalist who is training to be an astronaut, genetically predisposed to a major heart attack?

Does Steven Pinker, the prominent psychologist and author, have a gene variant that raises his risk of Alzheimer's, which his grandmother suffered from, to greater than 50 percent?


On Monday, they may learn the answers to these and other questions -- and, if all goes according to plan, so will everyone else who cares to visit a public Web site, The three are among the first 10 volunteers in the Personal Genome Project, a study at Harvard University Medical School aimed at challenging the conventional wisdom that the secrets of our genes are best kept to ourselves.

The goal of the project, which hopes to expand to 100,000 participants, is to speed medical research by dispensing with the elaborate precautions traditionally taken to protect the privacy of human subjects. The more genetic information can be made open and publicly available, nearly everyone agrees, the faster research will progress.

In exchange for the decoding of their DNA, participants agree to make it available to all -- along with photographs, their disease histories, allergies, medications, ethnic backgrounds and a trove of other traits, called phenotypes, from food preferences to television viewing habits.

Including phenotypes, which most other public genetic databases have avoided in deference to privacy concerns, should allow researchers to more easily discover how genes and traits are linked. Because the ''PGP 10,'' as they call themselves, agreed to forfeit their privacy, any researcher will have a chance to mine the data, rather than just a small group with clearance.

The project is as much a social experiment as a scientific one. ''We don't yet know the consequences of having one's genome out in the open,'' said George M. Church, a human geneticist at Harvard who is the project's leader and one of its subjects. ''But it's worth exploring.''

A new federal law prohibits health insurers and employers from discriminating against individuals on the basis of their genetic profile. But any one of the PGP 10 could be denied life insurance, long-term care insurance or disability insurance, with no legal penalty. And no law can bar colleagues from raising an annoyed eyebrow at a PGP participant who, say, indulges in a brownie after disclosing on the Internet that she is genetically predisposed to diabetes.

Then there is the matter of potential recrimination -- from siblings, parents and children who share half of the participants' genes and did not necessarily agree to display them in public. Prospective participants are advised to consult with first-degree relatives, but except for identical twins, their consent is not required. Some volunteers are worried about their hurting their teenagers' dating prospects.

''A potential boyfriend could look at my genome and say, 'I don't know if this relationship is meant to be,' '' said John Halamka, a participant and the chief information officer of Harvard Medical School, who has a 15-year-old daughter. (His daughter, he said, told him that if a suitor did that, ''I wouldn't want them as a boyfriend anyway.'')

Because of the known and unknown risks, Dr. Church required the first 10 participants to demonstrate the equivalent of a master's degree in genetics. Most are either investors or executives in the biomedical industry, or else teach or write about it, so they may have a financial interest in encouraging people to part with their genetic privacy.

The project has drawn criticism from scientists and bioethicists who caution that even its highly educated volunteers cannot understand the practical and psychological risks of disclosing information long regarded as quintessentially private.

''I'm concerned that this could make it seem easy and cool to put your information out there when there is still a lot of stigma associated with certain genetic traits,'' said Kathy Hudson, director of the Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University. ''There will be new uses of this data that people can't anticipate -- and they can't do anything to get it back.''

For now, the PGP, which is privately funded, is sequencing only the fraction of participants' genomes thought to have the most influence over disease, behavior and physical traits. But the question of how much value to place on genetic privacy has taken on more urgency as the technology for sequencing an entire human genome accelerated and the price has plummeted to as low as $5,000, so that it may soon be possible for everyone to possess their own genetic readout.

Sequencing a human genome -- the six billion letters of genetic code containing the complete inventory of the traits we inherited from our parents -- cost over $1 million just two years ago.

The two scientists whose full genomes were sequenced in the name of research both made them public. But they differ on whether the practice should be widely recommended.