Genotyping At Birth!

By
Yolando S.
Kevin R.
Period 7

So let us give you a quick background information about GENOTYPING. Genotyping is basically about being able to know what you will get in the upcoming future. The ability to know if a person is going to have a disease in  few days/months/years. It could be anything just cancer, etc. "Developments in Genotyping over the last six months lone have identified gene variants that can predict predisposition for cancer, hepatitis, ADHD, cardiovascular disease, anxiety, cervical cancer, alcohol dependency, Alzheimer's disease, mental retardation, longevity, multiple sclerosis Parkinson's disease, psychosis, migraine, stroke, heart attack, financial risk taking, obesity, suicide smoking, and depression"

Genotyping sounds like a good thing, right? No, it could potentially hit you Emotionally. Lets give you a real life situation. You are a parent and you just got your baby. You let it get genotyped and the doctor says "Your baby will get Cervical Cancer at the age of 8." How will you feel? How would you act? A person can get mentally hit and become depressed. Now you will be restricting your child to do what a normal kid can do because of that disease he will get any time soon. You will be overprotective. In addition, once the child finds out about his future disease, h/she could go to the depression stage. He/she will act completely different than before. He/she might start thinking about his future not being as fun as he would want because of that disease.

And to tell you more, Genotyping is not 100% ACCURATE! "Although genotyping errors affect most data and can markedly influence the biological conclusions of a study, they are too often neglected. Errors have various causes, but their occurrence and effect can be limited by considering these causes in the production and analysis of the data. Procedures that have been developed for dealing with errors in linkage studies, forensic analyses and non-invasive genotyping should be applied more broadly to any genetic study. We propose a protocol for estimating error rates and recommend that these measures be systemically reported to attest the reliability of published genotyping studies." and according to Nature.com "While blood group genotyping is becoming increasingly used in many areas of transfusion medicine, typing errors have been documented" The studies of Genotying has not been developed properly yet, there has been a lot of errors through out the sequencing process. The tips of the tree are largely based on SNPs discovery bias. Phylogenetic Tree is the process of showing relationship of other biological elements/species.




But you can always do something about it and that's the good part about Genotyping. It gives a person the ability to address the problem as soon as possible. A person can go through therapies and get the disease cure, if possible. A person will be more prepared to his/her upcoming problem. It gives them time to think about what thy will do about their life, what they want to do, and if they are going to let that problem drag them down. On the other hand, the statement below will explain how genotype and environment is related to each other. "As researchers make progress in elucidating the roles of specific genes that contribute to the risk of alcohol dependence, they also need to understand how the interplay between genetic and environmental risk factors increases risk. The term “genotype x environment (GxE) interaction effect” refers both to the modification of genetic risk factors by environmental risk and protective factors and to the role of specific genetic risk factors in determining individual differences in vulnerability to environmental risk factors. Understanding the contributions of GxE interaction effects to the risk for and development of alcohol dependence and coexisting disorders is of paramount importance. These GxE interaction effects can be determined by appropriately designed family and molecular epidemiological studies, such as studies of children of twins and prospective family studies."

So, Is Genotyping Moral? Or Immoral? Here's our take on it.

This is immoral due to the fact of putting the child through the fear of knowing what will come to them and putting the parents on full alarm of the diseases it has been diagnosed with. It would be better to just see the effects come through their life. Instead of always living in constant fear of knowing what will come to them. By just having the free mind of just going with the flow of events in one’s life. This doesn’t affect me since my partner and I are already teens. If I did get genotyped when I was a baby, then I would hate having to live with the conditions that would come to me in my life.

Watch what other peoples opinion by clicking the video below!

CITATIONS

Genotype before birth and at birth - positives and insurance coverage. (2010, May 11). Retrieved February 18, 2015, from http://www.examiner.com/article/genotype-before-birth-and-at-birth-positives-and-insurance-coverage “Developments in genotyping over the last six months alone have identified gene variants that can predict predispositions for cancer, hepatitis, ADHD, cardiovascular disease, anxiety, cervical cancer, alcohol dependency, Alzheimer's disease, mental retardation, longevity, multiple sclerosis Parkinson's disease, psychosis, migraine, stroke, heart attack, financial risk taking, obesity, suicide smoking, and, depression.”

Establishment of Reference Panels for Blood Group Genotyping Tests. (n.d.). Retrieved February 18, 2015, from http://www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/ScienceResearch/BiologicsResearchAreas/ucm352425.htm “While blood group genotyping is becoming increasingly used in many areas of transfusion medicine, typing errors have been documented.”

Result Filters. (n.d.). Retrieved February 18, 2015, from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6306039 “Hormonal reference data, in the form of nomograms relating baseline and stimulated levels of adrenal hormones, provide a means of genotyping steroid 21-hydroxylase (21-OH) deficiency in congenital adrenal hyperplasia”

(n.d.). Retrieved February 18, 2015, from http://www.nature.com/tpj/journal/v14/n6/full/tpj201427a.html “by analyzing a set of 50 human liver microsomes using endoxifen formation from N-desmethyl-tamoxifen as the phenotype of interest”