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.

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.

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

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

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

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

In Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., the Supreme Court ruled that synthetically created DNA is patentable, but the isolation of unaltered gene sequences is not.

Though they claim to, direct-to-consumer genetic tests may not correctly identify an individual's ancestral background, and thus may overstate or understate one's risk for heritable disease.

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.

A case study of shared decision making guided by the patient values.