The Ethics of DNA Databasing: The House Believes That People's DNA Sequences are Their Business and Nobody Else's

An online debate at The Economist:: Professor Arthur Caplan:

Emmanuel and Robert Hart Professor of Bioethics and Director, Centre for Bioethics, Penn University

There are, it is increasingly said, plenty of reasons why people you know and many you don't ought to have access to your DNA or data that are derived from it. Have you ever had sexual relations outside a single, monogamous relationship? Well then, any children who resulted from your hanky-panky might legitimately want access to your DNA to establish paternity or maternity.

Craig Venter, Against:

As we progress from the first human genome to sequence hundreds, then thousands and then millions of individual genomes, the value for medicine and humanity will only come from the availability and analysis of comprehensive, public databases containing all these genome sequences along with as complete as possible phenotype descriptions of the individuals.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at March 24, 2009 10:28 AM
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