Developing technologies for personalized medicine may be misused to popularize the idea that one can infer a person’s genetic makeup from observer-defined or self-reported assignment to a race or ethnic group.
The experience of an English professor dying of ovarian cancer in Margaret Edson’s play Wit shows that both literary and medical discourse obfuscate and objectify rather than promote communication of “simple human truths” that dignify life and death.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(9):858-864. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.9.imhl1-1509.
When patient autonomy became a closely held value in medical ethics in the 1960s and '70s, the physician’s conscience-based right to refuse to deliver a given service began to be contested.