In case you missed it, Stanford's Hank Greely, JD, was a guest last week on NPR's Science Friday. The topic? Genetic testing.
With the cost of genome sequencing going down, experts predict an increasing number of people will soon have access to their genome - and Greely said this raises a plethora of legal and ethical issues:
...What interests me is we've got this - I think tidal wave is the best analogy - of information coming in. We're going to get swamped by it, and we're not paying attention to it.
Some of that will have straight legal implications, like who gets sued when, when something goes wrong. Some of it'll have broader implications for the structure of the health care system. Some of it'll have really interesting, deep ethical questions about, for example, your obligation to your relatives, when you find out something about yourself that might affect them.
All of these things are fascinating. I'm not sure that we know the answers to very many of them, but I do know that we're going to have to come up with answers pretty soon.
Previously: Genomics gets personal, The cost of whole genome sequencing plummeting, You say you want a revolution and Whole genome sequencing data vaults into clinic
