Making US workers pass genetic test data to employers is wrong
By Martina Cornel,
New Scientist
| 03. 17. 2017
A proposed law effectively allowing US employers to require workers to take DNA tests and hand over the results is misguided
Letting companies require workers to have genetic tests and disclose the results sounds practically dystopian. But that’s the effect of a new congressional bill in the US.
Employees can refuse to comply, but risk being penalised by having to fork out thousands of dollars in extra health insurance payments – the threat of which might be enough to coerce them into going along with it.
This inflammatory proposal has been backed by Republican members of the House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce.
With US employers funding a large chunk of employees’ health insurance, they may, understandably, want to rule out staff having certain health risks, which would in turn keep premiums down. Sure, genetic tests can quantify some of those risks. But the bill blows a huge hole in the principle that genetic testing should be voluntary and directly undermines the US Genetic Information and Non-Discrimination Act (GINA).
What’s more, many of the risk-reducing options...
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...
