Ethicists Debate How to Tell Patients Secrets in their Genome
By Monya Baker,
Nature
| 11. 10. 2012
If parents have a son’s genes sequenced in hopes of explaining extreme muscle weakness, should they also be told whether he is likely to get Alzheimer’s disease as an adult? Should the child be told? When? How do answers to these questions shift for currently healthy adults? And should people be given more or less information depending on what they want to know?
As more and more people get large-scale sequencing as part of clinical care and research, the genetics community is struggling to define what to tell people about their own genomes. At the meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics, Holly Tabor at Seattle Children’s Hospital described an emerging approach to help people decide what results from their sequencing data they want to see and when.
Tabor has developed a web-based platform to manage the process. A website, called
my46, explains types of mutations and lets users select whether they want to get results about variants associated with drug response, disease risk, and ancestry. They can also select to find out whether they carry mutations for...
Related Articles
By Emily Glazer, Katherine Long, Amy Dockser Marcus, The Wall Street Journal | 11.08.2025
For months, a small company in San Francisco has been pursuing a secretive project: the birth of a genetically engineered baby.
Backed by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and his husband, along with Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong, the startup—called...
By Jessica Hamzelou, MIT Technology Review | 11.07.2025
This week, we heard that Tom Brady had his dog cloned. The former quarterback revealed that his Junie is actually a clone of Lua, a pit bull mix that died in 2023.
Brady’s announcement follows those of celebrities like Paris...
By Emily Mullin, Wired | 10.30.2025
In 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui shocked the world when he revealed that he had created the first gene-edited babies. Using Crispr, he tweaked the genes of three human embryos in an attempt to make them immune to HIV and...
Public domain portrait of James D. Watson by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
and the National Human Genome Research Institute on Wikimedia Commons
James Watson, a scientist famous for ground-breaking work on DNA and notorious for expressing his antediluvian opinions, died on November 6, at the age of 97. Watson’s scientific eminence was primarily based on the 1953 discovery of the helical structure of DNA, for which he, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or...