【单选题】

Imagine a world where your doctor could help you avoid sickness, using knowledge of your genes as well as how you live your life. Or where he would prescribe drugs he knew would work and not have debilitating side-effects.

Such a future is arriving faster than most realise: genetic tests arc already widely used to identify patients who will be helped or harmed by certain drugs.And three years ago, in the face of a torrent of new scientific data, a number of new companies set themselves up to interpret this information for customers. Through shop fronts on the Internet, anyone could order a testing kit, spit into a tube and send off theirDNA、— with results downloaded privately at home.Already customers can find out their response to many common medications, such as antivirals, contraceptives and blood-thinning agents. They can also explore their genetic likelihood of developing deep-vein thrombosis, skin cancer or glaucomA、
Governments hate this sort of anarchy andAmerica’s, in particular, is considering regulation. The industry has been subject to conflicting criticisms. On the one hand it stands accused of offering information too dangerous to trust to consumers; on the other it is charged with peddling irrelevant, misleading nonsense. In fact, there are many kinds of test and some are much more useful than others. For some rare disorders, such as Huntington’s and Tay-Sachs, genetic information is a diagnosis.But this is unusual. Most diseases are more complicated and involve several genes, or an environmental component, or both. Someone’s chance of getting skin cancer, for example, will depend on whether he worships the sun as well as on his genes.
America’s GovernmentAccountability Office (GAO) did not grasp that distinction, between prediction and diagnosis, when it lambasted genetics-testing companies recently for offering disease predictions that were at odds with their customers’ actual medical conditions, it was wrong because even someone who has a lower-than-average genetic risk of heart disease can suffer a terminal cardiac arrest.And the GAO report also went to extraordinary lengths to reveal what the industry has openly admitted for years: that results of disease-prediction tests from different companies sometimes conflict with one another, because there is no industry-wide agreement on standard lifetime risks.
Regulators ought to assist in drawing up the standards the industry has been asking for. it might also be wise to consider asking for certain proofs to have been established before a firln can claim to be able to make a firm association between a disease and aDNA、sequence. For some complex conditions all the genes that contribute to risk have not yet been discovereD、
But three things argue against wholesale regulation. First.the level of interference needs to bc based on the level of risk a test represents. The government does not need to be involved if someone decides to trace his ancestry or discover what type of earwax hc has. Second, the laws on fraud should bc sufficient to deal with the snake-oil salesmen who promise to predict, say, whether a child might be a sporting champion.And third, science is changing very fast. Fairly soon, a customer’s whole genome will be sequenced, not merely the parts thought to be medically relevant that the testing companies now concentrate on, and he will then be able to crank the results through open-source interpretation software down-loadable from anywhere on the planet. That will create problems, but the only way to stop that happening would be to make it illegal for someone to have his genome sequenced — and nobody is seriously suggesting that illiberal restriction.
Instead, then, of reacting in a hostile fashion to the trend for people to take genetic tests, governments should be asking themselves how they can make best use of this new source of information. Restricting access to tests that inform people about bad