Positive And Negative On Dna Profiling Essay, Research Paper

Genetic engineering has developed and blossomed at a frightening rate in the last decade.

Originating as merely an area of interest for scientists, genetic engineering has now

become an area of which all people should be somewhat knowledgeable.

DNA profiling has many uses, both positive and negative, in our society. Aside from its

usefulness in many legal investigations, DNA profiling can be used in the workplace to

discriminate against employees whose profiles could pose a financial risk. For example,

genetic technology can and has been used to determine the capacity of a person to

contract certain diseases, such as sickle-cell anemia, which could cause many employers

to hesitate in the hiring and training of such people. In the early 1970’s, the United States

began a carrier screening for sickle-cell anemia, which affects 1 in 400 African-Americans.

Many of those identified as carriers mistakenly thought they were afflicted with this

debilitating disease. Furthermore, confidentiality was often breached, and in some cases,

carriers were discriminated against and denied health insurance.

Nevertheless, genetic profiling has been beneficial in paternity suits and rape cases, where

the father or the assailant could be identified. However, despite its growing number of

utilizations, DNA profiling is extremely hazardous when results are inaccurate or used to

discriminate.

The frequency of genetic testing in criminal investigations (more than 1,000 in the U.S.

since 1987) has been increasing dramatically despite the inconclusive testing by the

scientific community in many aspects of forensic identification. A correlation between DNA

patterns taken from a crime scene and taken from the suspect has often been enough to

charge a person with the offense in spite of proof that some procedures for testing DNA

are fallible by legal and scientific standards.

The complexity of scientific evidence, especially DNA profiling, has also caused many

problems within the legal profession. It is no longer enough for attorneys or members of

the jury to merely be knowledgeable about the law. People need to familiarize themselves

with today’s scientific research rather than relying on the credentials of a scientific expert

witness. Too often, jury members become in awe of the complicated, scientific terms used

in court and take a scientist’s testimony as fact. Lawyers need to increase their scientific

knowledge and keep up with ongoing research in order to competently question and

understand scientific evidence put forth.

But these do not represent the only possible downfalls of DNA profiling in criminology. The

involuntary seizure of one’s blood or hair undermines the constitutional rights guaranteed

to all citizens by the Fourth Amendment (protection from unreasonable searches and

seizures). Nevertheless, many argue that a DNA sample taken from a suspect could lead to

an indictment or release of the individual and, thus, warrants an exception from the Fourth

Amendment. Besides, one could make a plausible argument that, once held in custody, the

seizure of a person’s strand of hair does not violate a suspect’s Fourth Amendment rights

or rights of privacy because the hair is visible.

However, the use of DNA profiling does not end in criminal investigations. DNA testing has

ventured out of the courtroom in an effort to show a genetic link between race and violent

tendencies. If successful, this link will do nothing but justify prejudice attitudes toward

minorities, particularly the black race. Furthermore, such biological approaches towards

criminality do not take into account sociological factors, such as poverty, and would

inevitably lead to the practice of controlling minority children with the use of therapeutic

drugs or worse. For this and other reasons, courts of all levels must implement harsher

scrutiny in the area of genetic profiling and its uses.

There is also a current effort to create a national database of DNA, much like the existing

database of fingerprints. Supposedly, the use of numerical codes will allow huge

databases to search for a match of a individual DNA band. However, these matches are

not 100 percent. This inconclusive correlation between DNA patterns has led to a heated

debate which has culminated in federal court with Daubert vs. Merrel Dow

Pharmaceuticals Inc. The ruling in the Daubert case said that the acceptance by the

scientific community is not enough by itself to allow certain scientific techniques into court

as evidence, especially given the reality that a suspects entire future could hang in the

balance of a scientific finding.

Many people have argued that the use of a national DNA database infringes on the

individuals constitutional rights to privacy. However, law officials have claimed that the

advantages this database presents for society supercede the individual’s rights. This

dilemma can easily be associated to the “social contract” presented by Thomas Hobbes. In

this contract, Hobbes believed that each individual should give up certain individual rights

in order to achieve protection from the whole. The forfeit of the right to privacy of one’s

DNA can thus be considered one of these forfeited rights. A person must weigh the

advantages of having a past, present, or future criminal’s DNA profile on database with the

disadvantages of having one’s own. But the disadvantages will outweigh the advantages

when private institutions develop access to this database and use the information for

discriminatory purposes.

The impending usage of a national DNA database poses many possible risks of political

and commercial abuse of such information, along with the danger this information falling

into the hands of unfriendly parties, are unpredictable. Such unpredictability, certainly, is a

violation of people’s rights to privacy. For instance, if a private institution, such as a bank,

an employer, or an insurance company, receives access to this information, it could

influence decisions on loans, hiring practices, insurance rates, etc. Society, then, is faced

with a conflict between an individual’s right to privacy in one’s genetic composition and the

employer’s or insurance company’s interest in knowing about a person’s health problems.

This conflict will constitute the remainder of this paper.

Over the next ten to fifteen years, scientists involved in the federal government’s “human

genome project” will try to identify in detail each of the human cell’s estimated 100,000

genes. The knowledge derived from the project will enable physicians to detect an

increasing number of diseases and predispositions for diseases.

When Frank married at age 31, he decided to take out a

life insurance policy. A swimmer and avid racquetball

player with no previous hospitalizations, he felt cer-

tain his low premiums would be a worthy investment for

his family.

Weeks later, after a routine physical exam, he was

shocked by the insurance company’s response. Sophisti-

cated DNA testing had revealed in Frank’s tissues a sin-

gle missing copy of a so-called RB antioncogene and minor variations in two other genes.

Computer analysis showed

the molecular misprints more than tripled his risk of getting small-cell lung cancer by age

55. His application was rejected.

With the newfound ability to reveal an individual’s molecular secrets come significant new

possibilities for discrimination. The medical records of people who apply for insurance are

stored by the Medical Information Bureau, a data bank shared by a consortium of

hundreds of insurers. Ethicists warn that genetic tests could tempt insurers to discriminate

against the “healthy ill;” people who are not yet sick but who carry genetic traits

predisposing them to future illness, such as in Frank’s case. However, these people may

not be denied health insurance totally. Rather, they may be guaranteed a basic level of

treatment and rationed out of more costly procedures. For example, someone who carried

the cystic fibrosis gene, even if asymptomatic, could be denied a lung transplant. The

competitive nature of the industry may compel insurance companies to use genetic

information, since the fundamental principle of the insurance business is “pooling

uncertainty.” The concept of adverse selection also causes insurers much dismay. Adverse

selection refers to the probability that people privately aware of a medical problem are

more likely to seek medical insurance. This negates the insurers policy of setting

premiums with accordance to statistical information on the rates of illnesses and

sicknesses in society. “The whole foundation of insurance is based on the fact that we and

the insurance applicant are operating with equal levels of knowledge and ignorance.”

Without this level of ignorance, insurance companies will lose their social value as a

means of spreading risk across groups of people.

Genetic engineering with respect to insurance does not stop here. Further development

could lead to a complete knowledge of who will develop a disease and when. This will

drastically effect the practicality of life insurance policies. “I can see 20 or 30 years from

now that life insurance policies will be essentially accident policies, because everything

else will be foreseeable. The essence of insurance is you assess a risk against the

unknown; if there’s no medical unknown, the only unknown is whether you’re going to get

hit by a bus.”

Another striking danger of insurance companies discriminating with respect to a person’s

DNA profile is with infants. The companies may become extremely hesitant in insuring

babies who have a high susceptibility to certain diseases. In fact there have been some

cases where the insurers actually demanded the parents to abort the fetus or risk losing

insurance. This obviously constitutes a blatant violation of people’s rights. Plus, it

dangerously causes the insurance companies to begin to play the role of God, that is, in

deciding who should live and who should not. “By agreeing to pay for some infants and not

for others, insurance companies could inadvertently practice a form of economic eugenics,

based not on grand designs for a superrace but on who requires the least expensive

medical care.” Perhaps, some form of national health insurance is the only remedy for

these problems. “Genetic testing may provide the best reason yet for a nationalized

health-care policy.”

But insurance companies are not the only private entities with the potential to discriminate

against people with unfavorable genetic profiles. Employers, too, have a substantial

financial risk in hiring an employee with an above average propensity for illness or early

death.

Ellen spent four years completing her PhD in industrial

and chemical engineering. Now, wincing as a company

doctor drew a few drops of blood for her preemployment

physical, she could hardly contain her excitement about

the job she’d been offered at one of the country’s fore-

most metallurgical research institutes.

Two days later the phone call came. You are perfectly

healthy, the young doctor said. But tests have revealed

you harbor a gene that can result in decreased levels of

a blood enzyme, glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase. With-

out the enzyme’s protection, you have a slightly increased

risk of developing a red blood cell disease if you come

into contact with certain chemicals in our laboratory.

I’m sorry, he said. The job has been offered to someone

else.

As Ellen’s case shows, the danger of discrimination certainly does not end with health

insurance. There is also a grave danger of discriminatory hiring practices in the workplace.

In 1989, Jonathan Beckwith, a geneticist at Harvard, and Dr. Paul Billings, director of the

division of genetic medicine at Pacific Presbyterian Hospital in San Francisco, completed a

small-scale study of genetic discrimination. Of 55 responses, Billings and Beckwith could

document 29 people who reported multiple instances of discrimination by adoption

agencies, employers and insurers.

And the percentages will only get worse as more and more companies implement genetic

screening policies. In a survey of 400 U.S. firms conducted in 1990, 15 percent of

companies responded that by the year 2000, they planned to check the health status of not

only their prospective employees, but their dependents as well before making a job offer.

These statistics show all too well the impending problem with genetic discrimination in the

workplace.

Employers will have a number of potential justifications for genetic testing in the

workplace. In some cases, there may be an argument in favor of testing for public health

reasons. Fortunately, judges and juries have predicted these justifications and have began

to make the necessary rulings to ensure true justification for discrimination. The relevant

judicial opinions indicate that there will have to be a significant or reasonable likelihood of

harm to others from having the individual employed. Hopefully, rulings such as these will

serve their purpose in protecting the right of all citizens.

With the balance of interests laid out (individuals concerned about confidentiality and

discrimination, and insurers and employers concerned about adverse selection and fiscal

liability), it will fall upon legislators and the courts to define the proper use of genetic

information. Policy makers will have to confront an apparent discrepancy between the

reality of genetic variability and the democratic ideal that all citizens are “created equal.”

The information itself is not the problem. What matters is how the knowledge is

used. Scientific advancements are not to blame. “What science does is give society

opportunities. What we have to do is look at these opportunities and then set up the

constraints and the rules that will allow society to benefit in appropriate ways.” Without

the proper constraints, the price of glimpsing one’s medical future is high indeed.

DNA profiling can be an extremely beneficial tool in the war against crime. However, when

used for discriminatory purposes, this tool becomes a crime in itself. The ability to

compare and contrast a person’s genetic code with another should not be taken lightly, for

with this great knowledge comes great responsibility. If not used wisely, this ability of the

few… will develop into a disability for the many.

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