ABSTRACT
Detailed knowledge about the genetic constitution of an individual provides information totally unlike anything accessible from any other source. The acquisition of personal genetic knowledge empowers an individual but in so doing can have ramifications for parents, relatives, offspring and society at large. The power of these uniquely powerful data will require enlightened legislation to ensure that, from healthcare to forensic science, they are used appropriately. Knowing about dominantly inherited conditions affects present and future generations as in the case of Huntington’s chorea; information about recessively inherited diseases almost always impacts only members of the next generation. Less contentious than therapeutic abortion is the use of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technology for pre-implantation screening. PCR can be used to amplify specific regions in our DNA which do not encode protein but simply consist of repeated base. One of the reasons that profiling technology is so powerful at identifying human remains is that PCR specialises in amplifying DNA.
