Senate passes genetic discrimination Legislation

This past Thursday the Senate passed a bill disallowing insurance companies and employers to withhold employment or service based on information from genetics. The bill was passed unanimously in the Senate, and will probably be put into effect sometime early this coming week (Bush supports the legislation). The Senate is hoping that with this bill, people will no longer fear that genetic test results will be held against them. They are hoping to see a rise in genetic testing, and the progression of gene based therapy.

I found this interesting because this is a good indication that we will soon be at the brink of genome based medicine. With the genome sequenced and many proteins elucidated, one wonders if one day medicine will be patient tailored. As bioengineers, an ethical conflict could have risen over whether genetic information would be private or public information. Still, I found this bill to be reassuring that the government realized this could present a problem, and has already taken action to eliminate a problem.


http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/04/24/senate.genetics.ap/index.html