ACMG Issues Clarification Over Incidental Findings Guidance
        
            By Dr Philippa Brice and Dr Ron Zimmern, 
                PHG Foundation
             | 05. 07. 2013
        
                    
                                    
                    
                                                                                                                                    
                                                                            
                              
    
  
  
    
  
          
  
      
    
            The American College of Medical Genetics (ACMG) has released a 
clarification of recent guidance issued on the subject of incidental findings in clinical genomics (see 
previous news).
This document aims to address five specific issues that have provoked concerns among commentators: patient autonomy, children, clinical laboratory issues, communication of results, and prediction of disease risk.
The ACMG’s approach to patient autonomy drew the heaviest criticism from PHG Foundation experts (see 
previous commentary), who found the recommendation that patients should be obliged to accept the feedback of incidental findings in the form of a set of specific disease-associated genetic variants as a condition of clinical genome sequencing ethically unacceptable. Whilst firmly acknowledging the potential clinical value of offering simultaneous analysis for the presence of these selected variants, the PHG Foundation concluded that failure to offer patients the ability to opt out of such testing or feedback of results was: ‘
a coercive strategy that should have no place in the modern practice of medicine’.
The ACMG has now released further information reiterating that the selected variants they specified...
 
 
  
 
    
    
  
   
                        
                                                                                
                 
                                                    
                            
                                  
    
  
  
      Related Articles
    
  
          
  
  
  
  
  
  
      
            
                  
  
      
    
    
                
                        
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                
                                                           By Megan Molteni and Anil Oza,  STAT | 10.07.2025
                                                        
     
    
    
            For two years, a panel of scientific experts, clinicians, and patient advocates had been hammering out ways to increase community engagement in National Institutes of Health-funded science. When they presented their road map to the NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya last...
 
       
 
 
  
      
    
    
    
    
            Paula Amato & Shoukhrat Mitalipov
[OHSU News/Christine Torres Hicks]
On September 30th, a team of 21 scientists from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) published a significant paper in Nature Communications, with a scientifically accurate but, to many, somewhat abstruse headline:
Induction of experimental cell division to generate cells with reduced chromosome ploidy
The lead authors were Shoukhrat Mitalipov, recently described here as “a push-the-envelope biologist,” and his long-term colleague Paula Amato. (Recall that in July the pair had co-published with...
 
       
 
 
  
      
    
    
                
                        
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                
                                                           By Pam Belluck,  The New York Times | 10.17.2025
                                                        
     
    
    
            Before dawn on a March morning, Doug Whitney walked into a medical center 2,000 miles from home, about to transform from a mild-mannered, bespectacled retiree into a superhuman research subject.
First, a doctor inserted a needle into his back to...
 
       
 
 
  
      
    
    
                
                        
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                
                                                           By Julia Black,  MIT Technology Review | 10.16.2025
                                                        
     
    
    
            Consider, if you will, the translucent blob in the eye of a microscope: a human blastocyst, the biological specimen that emerges just five days or so after a fateful encounter between egg and sperm. This bundle of cells, about the size of...