5 Questions To Ask About The Ethics Of Genetic Data

I treated a 42-year-old woman with metastatic ovarian cancer. She chose not to reveal it to anyone, including her family. Should her 26-year-old younger sister have been informed against her wishes, given she might have had a higher risk for the disease, and could perform genetic screening? Would she have wanted to know? How should she have been told?

It has been more than two decades since the first draft of the human genome project was published, ushering in the personalized medicine era, which is only just beginning. And yet, as scientists make significant headway in genomic…