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May 16, 2004

What he said

UK Nobel Laureate Wants Genetic Bias Ban
Fri May 14, 2004 09:51 PM ET

LONDON (Reuters) - A Nobel Prize winning scientist has called on the British government to introduce legislation to prevent discrimination on the basis of people's genetic make-up, the Guardian newspaper reported on Saturday.
"The main worry with genetic tests is abuse of the information," Sir John Sulston, who is a member of the government's genetics advisory panel the Human Genetics Commission, told the Guardian in an interview.

"So are we going to use them and lose the medical benefits, or are we going to alter society by drafting good laws so people are protected?" said Sulston.

Medical advances and the sequencing of the human genome have led to concerns that genetic testing could be used by insurance companies and employers to discriminate against people with an increased risk of developing certain diseases.

"People are quite right to be leery about having genetic tests until we have solid laws in place to protect their rights," Sulston told the Guardian.

"What we have to establish, right across the board, is the right for people to be treated equally, regardless of their genetic make-up.

"We can't just keep fudging the issue. Like laws on sexual and race equality, this could be very hard to police and enforce, but it is nevertheless worth pushing for.

Posted by P6 at May 16, 2004 11:09 AM
Trackback URL: http://www.niggerati.net/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1840
Comments

How about a person's genetic code being their personal property and not merely part of an ill-defined and vague " right to privacy" ?

Secondly, while I'm pretty sympathetic to this proposal in the article in principle it's useful to recall lawyers will take this to extremes. We don't need Medical and Law Schools admitting prospective doctors or Lawyers with 75 I.Q.'s, dwarf firemen, legally blind pilots, 500 lb clinically obese or hard-core alcoholic policemen all claiming and receiving exemptions from performance standards on grounds of genetic tendency.

( for that matter, how are we going to separate adult behaviors or conditions that are a result of environment from those that are strictly heritable conditions ? Most things are a mix of factors and there is significant " plasticity " of neuronal capabilities in the brain)

Posted by mark safranski at May 16, 2004 12:41 PM

How about a person's genetic code being their personal property and not merely part of an ill-defined and vague " right to privacy" ?

I got no problem with that. Nets out the same and I'm far less concerned with philosophy than results.

Posted by P6 at May 16, 2004 02:37 PM