Is Genetic Testing Humans Playing God?
By Robert Klitzman,
CNN
| 02. 22. 2014
Editor's note: Robert Klitzman is a professor of psychiatry and director of the Masters of Bioethics Program at Columbia University. He is author of "Am I My Genes?: Confronting Fate and Family Secrets in the Age of Genetic Testing."(CNN) -- "It's a miracle," she told me. "We can now have a baby that won't have Huntington's disease. I thought I'd never be able to have any kids -- because of the disease." Her father had died from this disorder, which results from a gene mutation. She feared that she might have the mutation, too. But she was too scared to undergo testing for it. She also worried that if she had it, she might pass it on to her children.
This disease causes severe neurological and psychiatric problems, and eventual death at around the same age as one's parent died of it -- usually in one's 40s or 50s. If a parent has the disease, each child has a 50% chance of inheriting it.
Woody Guthrie, the singer and songwriter, died of this illness. His children then...
Related Articles
By Fyodor Urnov, The CRIPSR Journal | 10.18.2024
The field of clinical gene editing has a bona fide crisis on its hands—a crisis that has to, and can be, promptly resolved.
An outside observer of our field might be surprised by this and say—what crisis? The first...
By Walt Bogdanich and Carson Kessler, The New York Times | 10.23.2024
By 2021, nearly 2,000 volunteers had answered the call to test an experimental Alzheimer’s drug known as BAN2401. For the drugmaker Eisai, the trial was a shot at a windfall — potentially billions of dollars — for defanging a disease...
By Ashleigh Wyss [cites CGS' Katie Hasson], Listnr | 10.09.2024
Discovering your genetic history can be as simple as spitting into a test tube, but what happens when your data ends up in the wrong hands?
With at-home DNA test kits becoming increasingly popular throughout the 2010s, curious consumers have...
By Kevin Davies , Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News | 10.22.2024