Dr Gabriel Watts1
1Sydney Health Ethics
This presentation examines the relationship between the potential for genomic data to yield new information through reanalysis, and the moral obligations incurred by those administering genomic tests. The two sides – descriptive and normative – of “the promise of genomics”. The central question I address is whether there is a moral duty to routinely reanalyse genomic data for the potential benefit of those whose information it is? Appelbaum et. al. (2020) argue that there is such a duty and that it is grounded upon the intrinsic stability of variant data across the course of a person’s life. I challenge this claim. I argue that the intrinsic stability of variant data has only limited moral salience when determining the nature and scope of a supposed duty to reanalyse genomic information. It is only in those clinical contexts in which the lifetime stability of variant data is directly relevant to patient treatment that this intrinsic feature of genomic information imposes a moral demand to routinely reanalyse data. Genomic information gathered through research, or through population screening incurs no such obligation. I conclude by considering whether there are also grounds for a moral duty to reanalyse genomic information, independent of the intrinsic properties of genomic data, that might extend to these latter contexts. I contend that there is, namely, when justice demands that diagnostic inequities are redressed through reanalysis.
Theme specification: My presentation touches on issues in clinical ethics, research ethics, and public health ethics, but is not directly in any of these categories. The claims I make are perhaps most pertinent to clinical ethics, but with a normative rather than practical or empirical bent.
Biography:
Gabriel Watts is a Research Fellow at Sydney Health Ethics.