Genetic Screening Will Not Put Limits on Equal Opportunity :: Science Biology Biological Essays

Genetic Screening Will not Put Limits on Equal Opportunity Introduction Genetic screening is a pressing issue in today's public policy forum, research and industry. Genetic screening provides enormous opportunities and is an incredible advance in science. However, genetic screening poses problems that are not and can not be easily overlooked. These are the following two issues dealt with in this paper. What can genetic screening offer people that currently is not being offered and at what cost to the people will this advance be? Genetic screening was devised to offer people a service and more important, to essentially, protect them from themselves. Genetic screening involves the screening of persons' genotypes to determine if they (1) are already associated with disease or are predisposed to disease, (2) may pass on disease to their descendants, or (3) produce other variations not associated with disease. (NAS 1975) Genetic screening is used as a means to prevent the onset or provide control for genetically inherited diseases. This in the long run is economical and treatment is effective. Screening of this type involves the detection of genetic disease and must first be defined to assure an understanding in the objectives of screening. Carriers of a genetic disease appear normal and are not affected except if the trait is expressed quantitatively across a population. In this case, the individual will have some disease characteristics however, not as severe as those with the disease. Individuals that have a genetic disease are almost always homozygous recessive for that gene meaning that there is an insufficiency in its ability to perform the correct function. One must not mistake a genetic screening test with a genetic diagnostic test. The difference is great and can be easily confused. A genetic screening test is not a definite confirmation of disease presence. It only gives an alert or signal to the possible presence that could affect the health of an individual. A genetic diagnostic test can tell with greater certainty if a disease is present in an individual. (Blatt 1996) Testing-Methods There are different times throughout the life span of a human in which genetic tests, both screening and diagnostic, can be preformed. The most popular and recognizable are the prenatal tests and testing of newborns. The genetic screening tests currently available for pregnant women are maternal serum alpha-fetoprotein (MSAFP) screening, enhanced MSAFP, amniocentesis, chorionic villus sampling (CVS), percutaneous umbilical blood sampling (PUBS), fetal biopsy and fetal cell sorting.