My Risk-Benefit Ratio for Personal Genetics

In high school I took a wonderful course in bioethics. We read about the infamous breaches of ethics by Nazi doctors and the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. We watched Gattaca and talked about unintended consequences and worst-case scenarios. The bulk of the course, though, was writing research reports that 1) presented a tricky bioethical question; 2) outlined several reasonable answers; and 3) came down in favor of a particular action. Much to my delight, I found all of my old reports in a file today. My 17-year-old self decided, apparently, that human cloning is bad, cochlear implants are good, and that parents should make decisions about the fate of their premature baby only if the baby has less than 50 percent chance of survival. (WTF?)Anyway, I’m certainly not an expert in bioethics. (If you’d like to follow a real bioethicist who writes smartly and beautifully, try Kelly Hills.) But I did learn from that high school class a fundamental bioethics concept that has become useful anytime I try to frame a sticky ethical situation: the risk-benefit ratio.Read more at...Only Human, January 2014.