Many of these problems, of course, aren't entirely new to medicine. The problem of access, for instance, is well known within the AIDS community, where ready availability of sophisticated antiviral drugs in the western world has not been mirrored in the developing world, and deaths continue to mount. But decisions about genes affect not just an individual, but an entire family. So, unlike other individual privacy debates in medicine, this new genomic world is one in which each action taken on each individual can have an impact on siblings, parents, children and cousins. You and your insurance company undoubtedly have different views of who should know what.
Insurance is based on the notion of anonymous pooled risk.
Insurance officials say this would tend to skew the pools, undermining the financial basis of their industry. Much of this ethical debate has grown out of the work of the international Human Genome Project, run by the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Consider the issue of genetic commercialization. Because the genes they discover can be registered with the U.S. Patent Office, and the hope is that useful products derived from those genes will return lucrative royalties for decades into the future. Suppose a human counterpart is found for each.