Personalized medicine: new perspectives – new ethics?

Abstract

Are new concepts in biomedical ethics required to keep pace with the developments in post-Human Genome Project (HGP) genomics? This paper traces the place of ethics in the post-HGP landscape. The need for a revision of the approach taken by biomedical ethics toward questions in genomics has been appreciated for years. Traditional biomedical ethics, led by the protection paradigm, was devised to serve a very different context. Today, compelling ethical questions arise from the tension between individual and collective interests in the context of population-based data collection and research. The collection of phenotype data, and the development of new sequencing technologies, raises burning questions that call for innovative tools and models in ethics. Future developments that will likely include the routine availability of personal genome information, and the advent of systems biology as a framework for interpretation, will require ongoing flexibility and a creative approach.