1 DNA, Data and Ethics

In discussions about genetics and ethics, a nexus of material is encountered which refers to a central component, the genetic material, DNA. Some discussions touch on DNA only tangentially; for instance, discussions on prenatal diagnosis of disease and its consequences are often more about reproductive medicine than genetics or DNA. But there are three quite distinct and recent developments which concern DNA itself. They are the development of DNA fingerprinting, the development of medical and DNA information banks such as the DeCode project in Iceland, and DNA sequencing initiatives such as the Human Genome Project. I am grateful to Catherine Cowley for raising some issues in relation to these developments,1 which I will try to address in this paper. One really significant problem, often overlooked by commentators, is that these developments involve using different physical techniques for treating DNA. This results in qualitatively different kinds of information and provokes different ethical questions as a consequence. These differences in laboratory techniques, and the information on DNA that they give, do not seem to have been taken into accoun