I agree that the necessary body of information necessary for proper interpretation by policymakers and policywriters just isn’t here yet. I also agree that we’ll have a hard time getting a large enough sample of screened individuals without some assurance that they won’t be picked on, but I just don’t think GINA is the way to do it. Worrying about your insurance rates going up or being rejected is a valid worry, but surely for every one risk factor that increases, you’ll have tons of things for which your risk can be shown to be very low, so why wouldn’t insurance companies keep taking your money? Wouldn’t this eventually lower risk, and therefore costs across the board? If you’re worrying about consumer uptake of genetic screening, GINA’s the last thing you’d want, because without it, the insurance companies would make it a part of their initial health screening, insuring massive uptake. That could only be good for patient health and the science, too.

Categorically forbidding insurers from using the results of your genetic screening is artificially keeping the market from being able to price your risk, and it’s going to be pretty much impossible to prove a violation anyways, so considering your suspicion of government ability, working with insurers seems like it would have been a better plan than promoting some unenforceable law.

Don’t get me wrong, some regulatory framework is certainly needed, especially at this early stage, but I really think the current approach is the wrong way to go about things.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have said “in theory.” But your caveats are huge: the science has not yet matured, without GINA the legal framework doesn’t exist, and we have plenty of evidence that we’re not terribly good at interpreting the results justly. Remember that this whole thread started because Michael Kinsley came out and basically said GINA was stupid and unnecessary. You and I agree that that’s not the case.

Sorry about the sic.

Genetics is merely the latest means by which to disqualify yourself or mark yourself replacement. It’s not special or problematic this way itself.

We’re a long way off from the time when the average person and their elected officials trust in the sharing of genomic information, so it’s just not going to happen, even if there is useful objective information that can be gained.

OK, so we can’t trust irrational bureaucratic risk abhorrence, nor can we trust today’s science.

So “Not yet,” I agree. “But yes,” someday we will trust governments and corporate bureaucracies because genetic tests will eventually be good objective information by which to make decisions.

“It is theoretically wrong because we know that we are more than our genes and because we have a long paper trail of misguided and inappropriate social engineering supposedly based on genes.”

So you are saying that selection by genetics is wrong IN THEORY, even if the science matures, the legal framework exists, and the results are interpreted justly?

Again, I support GINA because I certainly don’t trust governments and corporations to understand nascent science, nor institute just social policy.

But I also support meritocracy and making decisions using objective data.