The genetic make-up of a candidate in the next US presidential election could be exploited by an opponent to raise doubts about their health or personality. So say medical researcher and medical lawyer , both at Boston University.
Anyone who wants a sample of a candidate’s DNA could probably get it from coffee cups or cutlery that the person has used, or perhaps even handshakes. Combine that with the fact that a well-funded campaign could now afford to pay for a whole-genome scan, and the divulging of a candidate’s genome becomes a genuine possibility, Green and Annas write in The New England Journal of Medicine ().
Such an act is more likely to aid demagoguery than make reliable predictions, though: at present, little is known about the genetic roots of personality, while most genes associated with a disease only slightly bump up the risk of developing the condition.
“You could say truthfully that candidate A is at elevated risk for disease X, but that might increase his or her risk from 6 per cent to 6.5 per cent,” says Green. “That’s not really very meaningful.”
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Unscrupulous opponents could nevertheless try to exploit the idea that the candidate’s “bad genes” make him or her a poor choice, however misleading such a statement might be to those who don’t understand such details.
, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School in Boston, sees one possible benefit to set against such dangers. A dust-up over a presidential candidate’s genes could motivate the general public to learn more about genetics, he says.
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