"In an article published last year in Playboy, Lori Andrews discusses some of the issues that are arising with recent advances in genetic testing and the uses of genetic information. Andrews is a Professor at IIT's Chicago-Kent College of Law, and chaired the federal ethics advisory committee to the Human Genome Project.

You are determined by the 30,000 or so genes in your chromosomes and there are lots of folk who would like that information. For example, an insurer could find that you present an excessive risk of coming down with an expensive condition, years from now. So they could exclude you or charge you a higher rate.

But if you are already insured by that company, you will benefit since your rate will be lower if they can exclude or charge more for those who are genetically suspect.

Employers, especially those who self-insure, certainly wish to know this kind of protective information. They can require genetic testing, and choose to not employ those who posed a risk of expensive treatments down the line. The argument is that this a legitimate extension of requests for information, now that this information is available, like credit history or a criminal record.

But for some, it is a privacy issue. "Information about me, especially this most intimate of all information, should be mine to control," and the right to control this information should be protected by legislation.

(Dave Sagarin, March 19, 2007)

Lori Andrews is also the author of Sequence, a thriller with a geneticist heroine, and has another coming out in May.