Should DNA record keeping be considered an invasion of privacy?!

Americans seem to know it, if their resistance to the exchange of medical information is any indication. A Time magazine poll, for example, found that eighty-three percent of Americans believe that companies should be prohibited by law from selling medical information about individuals and that ninety-three percent believe that individuals should have to give their permission before such information can be made available.

National Institutes of Health Director Bernadine Healey testified that, "Like all powerful tools, genetic information can be misused and abused. Discrimination based on genotype must be prohibited as a matter of basic civil rights.” At the same hearing, James Watson added "The idea that there will be a huge databank of genetic information on millions of people is repulsive."

The human genome project has the potential to alter radically our views of privacy because control of and access to the information contained in an individual's genome gives others power over the personal life of the individual. Genetic information also has its own unique privacy implications in that much genetic information about an individual will also provide information about the individual's parents, siblings, and children. The power of this information is so potentially significant that personal liberty can be protected only by stringent safeguards on access to and use of genomic information. Current policies and practices governing the privacy and confidentiality of medical information are woefully inadequate to protect personal privacy and liberty in the new genetics age. Therefore, new rules for "gene banks" (DNA sample storage facilities) are needed to help minimize the harm to individual privacy and liberty that storage of genomic information could produce.