Direct-to-consumer genetic testing requires that physicians share decision making with patients, not order unnecessary tests or interventions, and refer to genetic specialists when necessary.

Mandatory genetic testing of health care professionals could help structure health care organizations’ responses to a pandemic. Patients and more susceptible employees can benefit, and these benefits must be weighed against concerns about fairness, autonomy, genetic privacy, and potential loss of employment opportunities.

Rare genetic disease research has something to teach precision medicine about addressing some patients’ limited access to treatment. Health disparities exacerbated by high costs and limited availability of drugs can, perhaps, be mitigated when patient activism accelerates drug development.

Though the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s collection of disaggregated genetic data for occupational surveillance and research raises numerous privacy concerns, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 allows genetic information to be used to develop personal pharmaceuticals.

Pregnant women at high risk for heritable diseases need support and nondirective genetic counseling.

Clinical utility is a test’s contribution to health outcomes, while personal utility considers the psychosocial and lifestyle effects and the value of the information to the patient.

Geographic disparities in availability of organs for transplant have spawned for-profit companies that help patients get on waitlists in more than one region and arrange travel for them if an organ becomes available.

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.

Chromosomal microarray analysis reveals many gene variants of unknown significance. The uncertainty about these variants—might they be deleterious or are they benign?—complicates genetic counseling.