What makes this an almost sinister ethical issue is that there will be powerful, commercial efforts to develop these tests and to make them widely available to clinicians.
Genetic information has considerable commercial potential .
The discovery of the BRCA-1 gene, for example, was not announced publicly until a patent had been applied for on the discovery, and a company, Myriad Genetics of Salt Lake City, had been formed to exploit the economic potential of the invention. As they occur in nature with their introns and exons in the cellular chromosomes, genes are not patentable. It is coded into messenger RNA by the process that reads the raw cellular DNA, but is not expressed in the cell. Since it thus realized by human ingenuity, using the enzyme reverse transcriptase, it is patentable. At least in this country it's patentable.