Adam Wernick reports:
If you agree to participate in a genome research study, what happens if the researchers find a risky gene in your sequence? Do they have an obligation to tell you? What if you don’t want to know? And what about your family members, who might share that problematic gene with you? Do they have a right to know?
“We’re in a unique historical movement,” says Dr. Robert Green, a medical geneticist at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. “I think in five years, or maybe seven or eight years, the cost and the availability of well-interpreted genomes will be so ubiquitous that anyone who’s interested in finding out this information about themselves can readily and easily find out about it.”
But for now, there’s a mess of conflicting demands and limited laws surrounding genetic information.
Read more on PRI.