Commercial Genetic Testing Is NOT Ethical

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Don’t do commercial genetic testing, it’s $1,000 and a big waste of your time and money. Not only are you wasting your time and money on something that isn’t ethical, you’re giving the companies the right to your past. How would you know if they’re trustworthy as well? I feel there needs to be more transparency when it comes to commercial DNA testing. Commercial genetic testing is unethical because you don’t know what they’re going to do with your DNA and also you’ll be losing a big part of your privacy.

When we look into ethics, we must first understand what ethics is. Ethics (as defined by Merriam-Webster Dictionary): “The discipline dealing with what is good and bad and with moral duty and obligation”. So when we think of people doing …show more content…

Commercial DNA tests work like this, you pay about $100-$200, 23andMe will send you a box within about 5-8 days, and you spit into a tube and return the box. Then you wait for about 6-8 weeks, and then you look at your results. 23andMe gives you your results by sequencing the DNA which means they take one of your DNA strands, untwist it and look at the nucleotides (the most basic part of the DNA), and these sequences will tell you if you are at risk for genetic disorders. Nucleotides are the genetic are the part of the DNA that tell the DNA what to make. Then the DNA tells the cells what to make, then the cells make it. The most common one being Alzheimer's. You can’t tell if you are someone's biological parent or child from these tests though. A regulated DNA test takes DNA from a child and DNA from a parent since the child will had got half of their DNA from one of their parents. If you test a fragment of DNA from a parent and a child about 50% of it should match the parent. So if you take 12 fragments of DNA from the child according to the statistics, 6 fragments will match and that will prove if they child is really the parents or not (Medical Genomics). What I am trying to say is that when you do an unregulated DNA test you get a lot less information than what a regulated DNA test will give

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