Toward the ethical treatment of whole genome research participants

Recent technological developments have made it possible for scientists to sequence an entire human genome, but these advances may be a mixed blessing. While much has been made of the benefits of whole-genome sequencing, from improved disease diagnosis to rational drug design, the impacts on the privacy and autonomy of individual participants has received much less scrutiny. In a new essay published in the open-access journal PLoS Biology, Timothy Caulfield and his colleagues argue that the ability to sequence a person's entire genome has created a whole new set of moral challenges that standard research ethics guidelines were not designed to solve.