Ethical Ramifications of Genetic Analysis Using DNA Arrays

Abstract

Since its earliest days, the history of human genetics has been checkered with actual, perceived, and potential abuses in the application of its scientific concepts to research or clinical endeavors. Aside from obvious cases of scientific fraud and continuing controversies over natural selection and biological determinism, a long and varied history of eugenics movements grew out of the (re)discovery of Mendel’s experiments at the beginning of the twentieth century. The term eugenics was first coined by Francis Galton in 1883 and defined as the science of improving the gene pool of the human species through selective breeding. The concept was soon extended well beyond its obvious and accepted precedent of animal husbandry to encompass social as well as physical traits, as Mendelian inheritance came to be viewed as the fundamental determinant of low intelligence, mental illness, substance abuse, physical handicaps, poverty, promiscuity, prostitution, and criminality. Eugenics thus provided a logical extension to the notion that such undesirable traits could be weeded out of the population through biological means rather than traditional social welfare policy, by enactment of restricted marriage laws, mandatory sterilization, euthanasia, or outright genocide. Of course, everyone knows that such policies reached their zenith (or nadir) in Nazi Germany, where the scope of supposedly genetic social traits to be eliminated through these means expanded to include race and ethnicity.