FROM CHANCE TO CHOICE: GENETICS AND JUSTICE

If there is one thing we share as members of the human family it is that what and who we most basically are is a matter of chance, not choice. Our parents have gambled in the genetic lottery and the result of the hidden tumbling and mixing of genes was revealed on our “birth” day. There, squirming in blankets of pink or blue lay the potential of the person we would become. As parents do, they saw that we drank our milk, took our vitamins, choked down cod liver oil, and all manner of concoctions they believed would confer upon us an added measure of health, strength, and vitality. According to their means, our parents enrolled us in little league, purchased a cello or piano and sat us down for music lessons before our feet could touch the  oor. They provided us with the Ž nest education and opportunitie s for enrichment that it was in their power to give. A parent’s “power to give” may, in the foreseeable future, be beyond today’s imaginings. The power to choose may someday make a “birth” day arrived at by chance irresponsible and, more signiŽ cantly, a moral wrong. Given the rapid progress of biotechnology in recent years and the successes of the Human Genome Project, the volume of available personal genetic information is on the verge of an explosion, the likes of which humankind has not known before. Science has revealed that essentially all diseases have a genetic basis, whether by conferring through inheritance a particular condition or merely an increased propensity for developing one. Even our ability to respond to infectious agents or to a particular treatment regimen is