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NIH Studies Universal Genome Sequencing At Birth

Posted by samzenpus on from the giant-book-that's-hidden-inside-you dept.

sciencehabit writes "In a few years, all new parents may go home from the hospital with not just a bundle of joy, but with something else—the complete sequence of their baby's DNA. A new research program funded at $25 million over 5 years by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will explore the promise—and ethical challenges—of sequencing every newborn's genome."

3 of 128 comments (clear)

  1. No. by some+old+guy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If no compelling medical issue requires sequencing in a newborn, it is invasive and coercive to conduct it.

    Any possible beneficial result is overshadowed by the inevitable abuse and misuse of the results. All I can see is creating a brand for each new child that will influence and determine decisions that may in fact have no significant scientific bearing. Predisposition is not certainty, and decisions based on uncertainty are, well, stupid.

    I'll be damned if I want my grandchildren automatically genome-branded by the government to the detriment of their education, employment, and insurability.

    --
    Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
    1. Re:No. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You worry about insurance companies getting accurate data so that they can compute the true cost of the risk that a customer carries. If you feel that isn't appropriate, then what you want is not insurance. Insurance is the pricing of risk. What you want is pooled expenses, which is what government programs is about - despite the wide-spread misunderstanding, that's not the service that insurance is supposed to offer. Insurance prices your individual risk while pooled expenses lets everyone pay for other people's risk. The two are fundamentally different. If you oppose giving insurance companies accurate information, then you are saying, whether you know it or not, that you don't want health care to be handled using an insurance model - you want a government solution using pooled expenses. Which would also solve your problem of worrying about insurability.

  2. Re:The paternity problem. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It shouldn't be legally possible for a person to make a decision about whether to take on legal parental responsibilities while being possibly deceived about whether they are the biological parent. That situation is no different, not in any relevant way, than getting a switched baby home from the hospital - something everyone can obviously see is horrible when it happens to women. So automatic parental certainty as a consequence of such DNA tests isn't a problem - it's a solution to a problem.