The Holocaust and the racial hygiene doctrine that helped rationalize it still overshadow contemporary debates about using gene editing for disease prevention.

Law doesn’t always adequately address unauthorized uses of individuals’ DNA. Ethics can help establish legal privacy protections that work.

A just culture perspective suggests that punitive responses to those who err should be reserved for those who have willfully and irremediably caused harm.

Prognostic uncertainty about risk creates demand for ongoing communication and facilitated reflection about goals and values.

Two pediatric cases highlight risks of prolonging anesthetic exposure for training purposes and prompt questions about influences of surgical training on outcomes.

Noninvasive prenatal testing arguably constitutes a form of eugenics in a social context in which certain reproductive outcomes are not valued.

This narrative illuminates need for students and clinicians to be well prepared to face ethically and structurally complex realities of identifying and responding to children.

Protecting patients rather than informed consent should be the goal when the complexity of information overwhelms patients’ decision-making capacity.

The question of whether and how results from personal genetic testing will motivate behavioral changes in consumers has only begun to receive the research attention it richly deserves.

Personal genome analysis available online