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Is publishing your genotype unethical?

Explore the complexities of genetic disease history and family consent in publishing personal genotypes. Ethics matter in genetics.

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Larry Moran thinks that I had to ask my parents and siblings for permission before publishing my genotype. Interestingly, most of his readers seems to disagree with Larry on this, so I won't offer my own response in any detail. They're handling it well enough. I would like to add though that obviously this isn't a either/or proposition. If my family had a history of a particular genetic disease which was well characterized in terms of causative alleles I might not have published my genotype. As it is, we don't. So I didn't see much of a downside. I would also add that in my case It wasn't possible to have genuine consent in the first place. My mother isn't much into science, and we don't share a common first language. There's really no way that I could have gotten substantive consent, insofar as my mother understood what I was ...

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