The first questions of ethical concern regarding genetic engineering and personalized medicine involve informed consent. With technologies like CRISPR, it’s possible that patients won’t fully grasp the long term consequences of gene editing. Transparency is an ethical practice, but information is complex and rarely do people making life changing choices understand everything about the information they are acting on.
Privacy and data security are also an important problem. Very sensitive is genetic data, on which personalized medicine leans so heavily. Information misuse or leak can result in genetic discrimination mainly in relation to employment or insurance. Robust safeguards are needed to protect people from exploitation or breach of confidentiality from use or information in the context of ethical frameworks.
Equity and access to present critical ethical issues. Treating genetically tends to be expensive, avenues are not open to all socioeconomic groups. It can exacerbate health disparities, allowing the rich to receive an ever increasing share of life saving discoveries. Policies necessary for ethical implementation include policies that will distribute fairly and not allow healthcare to be a luxury.
Consequentialism would also give us a means to avoid genetic enhancement and some would argue for the undoubted possibility of unintended consequences. The line between therapy and enhancement may be blurred: the goal is to treat or prevent disease. These are challenging problems of human identity, social expectation and 'designer baby.' We need to define ethical boundaries so that genetic technologies can be used right.
In addition, societal and cultural implications should not be neglected. It may be that genetic engineering is incompatible with religious or cultural concerns and therefore will give rise to conflicts of morality in each population. They must incorporate multiple frameworks or they must have the flexibility to incorporate many types of frameworks.
conclusion
Generally, genetic engineering in personalized medicine has great potential but it sure comes with ethical problems. Clearing these concerns with transparency, fairness and inclusivity is important. And the reason we can only do that through strong ethical guidelines for the use of personalized genetic technologies for the common good is that we can never pretend that this technology is neutral; it's not neutral.
