INSTEAD of helping people avoid illness, knowing the results of genetic tests
could make things worse.
One of the first benefits of the human genome should be a host of genetic
tests that reveal how likely you are to get, say, cancer or heart disease. But
the popular misconception that our destinies are written in our genes means that
such potentially life-saving tests could backfire, says Theresa Marteau, a
psychologist at Guy’s, King’s and St Thomas’s Medical School in London.
Marteau and her colleagues reviewed published evidence on how people respond
to genetic information. They found that for some conditions,…
