Wednesday, December 23, 2009

New technology- new issues?

The Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology recently reported a new technique for determining the sex of an unborn child. The technique, which consists of a simple blood test from the mother, can reliably determine the sex of a fetus as early as five weeks into the pregnancy. This technique raises ethical questions about the consequences of identifying X-linked diseases early in pregnancy. You can read more about it in the article, "Blood test tells gender of fetus as early as 5 weeks," which appeared on msnbc.com on December 21, 2009.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34471795/ns/health-pregnancy/

Monday, December 7, 2009

This week's article (for 12/8 meeting)

We will be revisiting the issue of the direct to consumer retail DNA test this week, since many of you were not able to attend our discussion earlier in the semester. Please read the following article, from Time Magazine's Inventions of the Year 2008, for background information about this topic:
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1852747_1854493,00.html