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January 16, 2020
** Could Genetic Testing for Educational Attainment Cause Harm? Hastings Researcher Begins First-Ever Study to Find Out
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Scientists can now scan a person’s genome for variants associated with traits such as educational attainment, as measured by years spent in school. Proponents look forward to the day when such testing may be validated and applied in educational settings. Others, like Hastings Center postdoctoral researcher Lucas J. Matthews, are concerned that genetic risk scores could be inaccurate, but worse, could cause harm, making students who get low scores feel stigmatized, lowering their self-esteem, or even reducing the likelihood that they will pursue higher education. Matthews is undertaking the first-ever study designed to assess the potential harms of telling students about their genetic propensity for education attainment. Read more ([link removed]) .
** In the Media: Should We Sequence the Genome of Every Newborn?
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** Late last year, the U.K.’s health secretary announced what he called a “genomic revolution”: a plan to sequence the whole genome of every baby born in a National Health Service hospital. Similar enthusiasm for newborn sequencing has been expressed in the United States. “Such sweeping plans for collecting and sequencing the DNA of newborns may appear bold and tech forward, but they lack nuance,” write Hastings Center director of research Josephine Johnston and Hastings Center Fellow Barbara Koenig in an essay in the Scientific American blog. Some sequencing results “can be used to improve medical care, but others are poorly understood, making widespread and untargeted use of the technology ill-advised.” Read the blog post ([link removed]) . A related feature article in Scientific American discusses a special report on newborn sequencing, published by The Hastings Center and edited by Johnston and Koenig,
who is a professor at the University of California, San Francisco. Read the Scientific American article ([link removed]) . The special report, whose conclusions were endorsed by The Lancet, a leading medical journal, says that while targeted or genomic sequencing can be used by clinicians to assist in the diagnosis of a symptomatic newborn, genome-wide sequencing of all newborns should not be pursued at this time, and health professionals should recommend against parents using direct-to-consumer genetic sequencing to diagnose or screen their newborns. Read the special report, “The Ethics of Sequencing Newborns: Reflections and Recommendations.” ([link removed])
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