Testing Little Johnny

A recent entry on 23andMe's blog, the Spittoon, in which Joanna Mountain recounts getting her children's test results, spurred Genetic Future's Daniel MacArthur to discuss the ethics of direct-to-consumer genetic testing of children. The issue, he says, is that adults can choose if they want to know their genetic risk of diseases while children cannot, and that once some one knows something, it can't be unknown. He says he has a "pretty laissez-faire view of genetic information" and is convinced by Mountain's approach -- she only lets them look at the results under her supervision and says that the benefits outweigh the risks. However, MacArthur later adds that the current information about the genes tested can be "seriously incomplete."