There’s been a lot of news recently about personal genetic testing, along the lines of 23andMe. A post from Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei, though, raises some of the ethical questions that could arise from DNA testing, particularly in countries where it would be legal to require such tests as a prerequisite to hiring. As Dr. Lei points out, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) passed the House last month, which should provide some measure of protection in the U.S. Unfortunately, the same consideration doesn’t hold true for Trinidad and Tobago, the UK, or Australia.

Here are some ways DNA from job applicants, including police recruits, can be used:

1. To predict current and future health status as it affects fitness for the job.
2. To determine insurance liability both for the job candidates and their families (since genes are inherited).
3. To assess personality traits, such as the MAOA gene which is associated with violent behavior, the D4-7 gene variant associated with risk taking, the stathmin gene associated with fear, and the CHRM2 gene associated with performance IQ, so that candidates can be matched with the appropriate job.
4. To make sure the candidate isn’t a crime suspect by comparing his/her DNA with DNA databases. According to another interview with Noel Perry, Assistant Commissioner of the Ethical Standards Commissioner in 2003, gang leaders and members of organized crime have joined police forces before (remember that horrible movie starring Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio, The Departed?).
5. In the case of police recruits, DNA can be keep on file for comparison to samples taken at crime scenes as a safeguard against police involvement in criminal activity.

This post raised some big issues, one of which was picked up on by more than one of the commenters:

If DNA is predictive, what are its appropriate uses?

Lei mentions Gattaca (I hadn’t picked up until now the connection between the movie title and the DNA bases G-A-T-C, but it’s a good one); to me, these questions are more along the lines of The Minority Report. If you could see the future, what would you do with it?

The question gets even trickier when you consider probability: if you could see one possible future with no guarantee that it would be accurate, what would you do about it? If someone has a 40% chance of committing a crime, should we put her in jail preventatively? If someone has a 70% chance of committing a sex offense, should we castrate him in advance?

Those are questions related to punishment, but what about reward? It’s common in most societies to want to affiliate with perceived success. What about predicted success? Jumping on the bandwagon? What if the prediction is that you won’t be successful—who’s gonna hire you?

These are important questions: important for deoxyribonucleic acid testing and important for VortexDNA intention-mapping, but there’s a fundamental difference in their significance. When applied to physical DNA, the probabilities are assumed to be fixed and deterministic: this DNA gives you this likelihood of this outcome.

With epigenetics and the DNA of intention, on the other hand, there is infinite opportunity to choose another outcome. If you choose to believe this, you are likely to get that result; if you change your beliefs, you can achieve this other result.

It’s clear that the two approaches would provoke fundamentally different reactions, and that there are tricky ethical questions that arise from both—I’ll be discussing them further over the coming days. What are some that occur to you? Would you want people to know your DNA? How about your core beliefs? Why or why not?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 19th, 2007 at 1:10 am and is filed under Epigenetics, VortexDNA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.