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Since its birth 30 years ago, proponents of the Human Genome Project have promised that genetics research would yield untold health benefits for all of us. Indeed, in 1990, James Watson asserted that failing to move the project ahead and usher in those benefits as fast as possible would be “essentially immoral.”
The COVID crisis, however, offers a supremely unwished-for opportunity to scrutinize the proponents’ promise, and to recalibrate the hope and money we invest in genetics. Such scrutiny and recalibration can be small steps on the path to fulfilling our nation’s professed commitment to the health of all of us.
Recalibration is not abandonment. In the midst of the crisis, genetics-based research tools offer some rare opportunities for optimism. They make it possible to track the spread of the virus and to test for the presence of the virus in individuals, and they may help to create a vaccinethat will protect the health of all of us.
In the midst of this crisis, however, it is impossible to ignore the obscenely and grotesquely disproportionate impact...