Genetic tests that analyze fetal DNA from a pregnant woman's blood are arriving in a rush, giving parents powerful tools for gleaning information about their unborn offspring. Three companies have launched versions of such tests in the past 12 months, and a fourth plans to do so later this year.
But the commercialization of these tests has brought a legal battle that could not only affect corporate profits, but also limit which patients will be able to access the tests and under what terms. The tangle of lawsuits may also offer a taste of future conflicts in the rapidly growing medical-genomics industry.
“If a single company has a monopoly on the market, it will essentially be able to dictate the standard of care and the quality of care,” says Mildred Cho, a bioethicist at the Stanford University School of Medicine in California.
The four firms are all based in California — Sequenom in San Diego, Ariosa Diagnostics in San Jose, and Verinata Health and Natera, both in Redwood City — and use similar techniques to identify fetal DNA in maternal...
By Anna Louie Sussman, The New York Times | 04.01.2025
Aggregated News
When Noor Siddiqui was growing up, her mother developed retinitis pigmentosa, a condition that leads to gradual vision loss. When Ms. Siddiqui’s mother was in her 30s, she began going blind. Last summer, Ms. Siddiqui told a podcast host that...
For months, an internet-wide guessing game has swirled around the question of where Elon Musk’s intelligence falls on the bell curve. President Trump has called...
By Peter Wehling, Tino Plümecke, and Isabelle Bartram | 03.26.2025
Biopolitical Times
This article was originally published as “Soziogenomik und polygene Scores” in issue 272 (February 2025) of the German-language journal Gen-ethischer Informationsdienst (GID); translated by the authors.
In mid-November 2024, the British organization Hope not Hate published its investigative research ‘Inside the Eugenics Revival’. In addition to documentating an active international “race research” network, the investigation also brought to light the existence of a US start-up that offers eugenic embryo selection. Heliospect Genomics aims to enable wealthy couples to...
Since Francis Galton coined the phrase “nature versus nurture” 150 years ago, the debate about what makes us who we are has dominated the human sciences.
Do genes determine our destiny, as the hereditarians would say? Or do we enter...
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