Apparently, this is the moment for widespread panic. Wielding their groundbreaking discovery, Craig Venter and Francis Collins also seem to have stumbled upon a few of our species' darkest fears: We stand on the verge of grasping every human being's genetic information. But who gets to see it? And, perhaps more importantly, who doesn't?
According to a CNN/TIME poll taken a week before Venter and Collins made their historic announcement, nearly two thirds of Americans wanted to dive into their own genetic material headfirst; 61 percent reported they would want to know if they were predisposed to contracting any particular diseases. But only 22 percent wanted their health insurers to get a peek, and a mere 14 percent were interested in letting Uncle Sam in on the data.
Given our widespread concern over Internet privacy, which usually only involves a couple of our credit cards, it's hardly surprising that we're not so hot on the idea of letting strangers rifle through our genetic identities. What would happen if, for example, during an interview in the not-so-distant future, a prospective employer shook your hand, walked into a lab and used the traces of you skin to evaluate your life span and your overall cost to the company's health insurance coffers? And let's say you were predisposed to developing breast cancer — how could you be sure your employers weren't denying you a job because you came up a loser on their genetic cost-benefit scale?
That's a very reasonable concern. But if people who think like Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, have their way, we'll be able to sleep a little easier in our brave new world. Caplan advocates establishing some kind of confidentiality law that would prohibit unauthorized testing and the free exchange of genetic information — a safeguard that would ostensibly provide each of us with a modicum of privacy.
And if Caplan's idea doesn't take root? Are we really responsible enough to understand the most intimate secrets of human life? We're just going to have to wait and see — an uncomfortable prospect, but perhaps exactly what we deserve. After all, now that the champagne has been drunk and the congratulations exchanged, it's a bit late in the game to be overcome by a fit of reflection.