'Am I My Genes?': Fate, Family And Genetic Testing
By NPR Staff,
National Public Radio
| 02. 27. 2012
Advances in genetic testing have improved the prediction, diagnosis and treatment of disease. But having increased information about your genetic makeup can raise some difficult questions and decisions.
Dr. Robert Klitzman wades through some of those challenges in Am I My Genes?: Confronting Fate and Family Secrets in the Age of Genetic Testing. For the book, Klitzman interviewed 64 people whose genetics indicate they might be at risk for Huntington's disease, breast cancer and other illnesses. These individuals faced a number of big choices: the decision to be tested in the first place, whether to reveal the results to family members and doctors, and how to plan for the future.
"People suddenly had to wrestle: Do I tell my 18-year-old son or daughter or my 17-year-old or my 21-year-old child that he or she therefore also has a 50 percent chance of having this mutation? Do I want to have that shadow their lives as they're just getting going on their independent adult lives?" Klitzman tells NPR's John Donvan.
Scientists have isolated thousands of genetic markers that indicate clear...
Related Articles
It’s been a busy couple of months in biopolitics, with developments in the US, UK, China, Japan, and implicitly on Mars. Time for a brief roundup.
• • •
Bioethics needs an update
The National Research Act is now 50 years old. It was signed into law on July 12, 1974, as a direct response to publicity about the 1932 “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” The Hastings Bioethics Forum celebrated its anniversary with an...
Image courtesy National Human Genome Research Institute
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is supposed to encourage effective medical advances while also ensuring that patients and research subjects are protected. This dual mandate demands tricky judgment calls that are made more difficult by outside pressures of several kinds, political, judicial, and especially commercial. This April story at Bloomberg examines one deeply troubling pattern of regulatory capture:
Americans Are Paying Billions to Take Drugs That Don’t Work
Companies are increasingly...
By Elizabeth Chuck, NBC News | 07.09.2024
A Netflix docuseries has put a spotlight on the unregulated world of sperm donation, particularly the lack of stopgap measures that might prevent donors who have been banned by one country from simply going elsewhere to donate more.
Released earlier...
By Amanda Becker and Shefali Luthra, The 19th | 07.08.2024
Image by Duke University Archives from Flickr
Republicans have adopted a slate of policy positions ahead of next week’s convention that does not call for a federal legislative abortion ban, but opens the door to establishing fetal personhood.
The Republican...
