How to Become a Trespasser in Your Own Genome

Gholson Lyon is on a crusade. It started last November, when he found out that a woman in a research study that he was conducting was pregnant. Lyon’s study had revealed that the woman carried a gene that causes a fatal disease. Yet he couldn’t tell the mother-to-be that she might be carrying a sick child due to the rules governing the study. The mother did give birth to a boy with the disease; he died in the same week that Lyon published his paper on the study, as I reported recently in Nature. Lyon was so disturbed by the situation that he is now trying to find a way for researchers to work within the rules so that they don’t face these same ethical dilemmas. And he is speaking and writing about the issue everywhere he can. The issue of what to tell patients about their DNA is difficult ...