In the name of privacy and protection of study subjects, the research community has, albeit with good intentions, broken the historical doctor-patient compact, distorting an ideal of information exchange that might inform subjects of health risks or benefits (1, 2). To minimize privacy risks in genomic research, investigators and institutional review boards (IRBs) construe that federal regulations require anonymized data. This disallows communicating pertinent results back to subjects. Such results could help the subjects and would justify the beneficence of that research (3). When large cohorts are enrolled for genomic and clinical characterization (4–6), both sides agree not to reconnect findings from the aggregated data or to infer meaning or insight for a specific patient, or to make that knowledge available to the patient. The scientific motivation behind this mutual commitment never to communicate or identify has origins in the evolution of modern study design (7). It has coincid