Researchers analysed thousands of laboratory-made plasmids and discovered that nearly half of them had defects, raising questions of experimental reproducibility.
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New parents needn’t confront these difficult questions just yet. The more than four million babies born in 2014 in the United States will likely be screened in traditional ways — by public health programs that check for sickle cell anemia and several dozen other serious, treatable conditions. So far, DNA-based tests of infants play only a small part in screening.
But that may change in the next few years, as technology that can sequence and analyze the entire genome of a child becomes available, potentially detecting a range of inherited genetic conditions at birth. It’s the same type of analysis that now can tell adults — if they choose to ask for it — whether they are at high risk for a certain type of cancer, for example. As the technology becomes more sophisticated, it will...