In "Controversial DNA test comes to UK", Michelle Roberts and Paul Rincon report that the personal DNA test, which was banned in the US, has been approved for use in the UK, although it still has worries about the reliability for the health decisions's base and company's using personal infomation (2014).
It may be awesome to know that we will have what kinds of diseases in the future. It reminds me of the famous actress Angelina Jolie's double mastectomy. After knwoing her high probability of breast cancer, she removed her breasts. In her case, her faulty gene, BRCA1, sharply increases her risk of developing breast cancer, but her decision might be difficult as a actress. Acording to Michelle Roberts and Paul rincon, BRCA 1and 2 genes have more strong implication of breast cacer. If the information doesn't have high accuracy of predicting diseases, nobody ignore the results of test based on DNA. The using of not perfect high technology could be a double edged knife. It might create more dangerous hastly decision about our health or might be helpful to prevent genetic diseases. Even if there are problems about whether this method is good or not, current flowing of this technology seems not to be changed.
Someday we might have full information about ourselves which could explain our expected diseases, expected physical chracteristics, expected life spans, and so on. I'm not sure that future world would be good. It seems that people would have more determined life, but we could find a way to adapt to that kind of world, I hope.
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ReplyDeleteLike Katie says “The using of not perfect high technology could be a double edged knife” but also it is perfect this high technology could be a double edged knife. If this technology is in the hands of a dictator or somebody like Hitler who wants to eliminate the people who are not like him and not like his fellow citizen. He can use this high technology to declare all the weakness of the people he does not like. In other culture, for example, it is know that the Bushmen does not react in the same way to the alcohol like most of other human groups, their behavior after drink alcohol is very crazy with a minimum consume of alcohol. This is a human group that many other ethnological groups wanted to eliminate for centuries, imagine with this kind of high technology they can found more specific things about DNA and alcohol and aggressiveness behaviors!
In the other hands, maybe this can of high technology can be used to heal the problems of the alcohol in this ethnological group, and the Bushmen or other human and to increase their life expectation.
I thought of Katie's post when I read a very different article on the BBC News this morning - "Richard III's DNA throws up infidelity surprise" by Paul Rincon (2014, December 2).
ReplyDeleteIt appears that the current Queen of England might not be related to her male predecessors quite as history records her being: she is certainly related to the female ancestors, but it looks like someone other than the actual king at the time might have been the father of the father of ... somewhere in the line of succession.
I wasn't really surprised by this: it's pretty obvious who someone's mother is, a pregnancy being very solid and clear evidence. However, the human male role in reproduction is so very brief and easy that I suspect a lot of children are children not of the men who think they are the fathers but of other men.
As Katie suggests, DNA testing here can also be a double edged sword. I remember some time ago reading that DNA paternity testing suggested that infidelity was far more common (more than 10% is the figure I remember, but I would have to check that) than people think.
And in hi-so families I'm sure it is at least as high. After all, for any lower class male, what could possibly be a better reproductive strategy than to have a child by a queen which is then passed off as a royal child?
Were systematic paternity testing to be done, I suspect it might reveal a lot of possibly unwelcome truths. Perhaps ignorance is sometimes bliss, although I think a better strategy is to opt for knowledge and change our outdated ideas about the value of such things as virginity, monogamy, and the like.