The post-genomics era and the public's growing ‘genetic curiosity’, together with the commercial offering of Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) genetic tests, merit particular consideration with regard to the consumption of these tests. DTC genetic tests are becoming increasingly prevalent, emerging as a fashionable, widely used health-assessment instrument. While viewed by some as an enabling tool for exercising one's autonomous quest for personal health information, others find them to be both ethically flawed and a disconcerting trend. The multiple ethical and legal concerns of the quest for genomic information through the use of DTC genetic tests will be highlighted in this paper, supporting the call for specific harmonised regulation of such tests. Gene-based personalised medicine appears to be the current ambition of many medical geneticists and researchers. However, the routine inclusion of individual whole-genome sequencing in one's medical file seems like a premature vision.1 At present, the road to full realisation of this vision is only fragmentally paved by identified single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), which are associated with specific disorders such as breast cancer, prostate cancer, and type 2 diabetes. Our current knowledge and understanding of personal genomics is far from complete. Many markers have not yet been discovered and their contribution to the incidence of disease, as well as their interaction with one another, is not clear, making their clinical application rather limited. Furthermore, the implications of what we do know (but do not always fully comprehend) on disease prevention or treatment have yet to be determined.2
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Sivan Tamir (2010) studied this question.