Question

1. Describe at least one societal issue that scientists will be able to address using the sequence of the human genome.

Answer 1

1. One societal issue that scientists will be able to address using the sequence of the human genome is reduction in the number of disable children born.
Using the sequences of human genome, scientists will be able to detect when a woman is carrying a defective or disable baby, this will allow decision to be made whether to abort the fetus or to keep the pregnancy. This will reduce the number of disable children born and reduce the amount of government resources that are been spent on this sector of the society.

2. By using human genome to assess the risk of giving birth to defective babies, the ethical considerations that will arise include the following:
i. Is it good to abort babies? Is that not murder?
ii. Who will make the decision to abort? The parents or the doctor? what of if the  parent want to keep the pregnancy despite the risk? 
These ethical questions will need to be addressed depending on the situations that surround the event.

3. Principally, the government ought to be the one to regulate how the human genome sequence is used by scientists. There ought to be a standard which give clear directives on what can be done and what can not be done.
But depending on the situation of the research involved, if human subjects are going to be used, then their consents must be obtained before the research is carried out. For instance, in the issue of pregnancy risk assessment described above, the woman's consent must be obtained before the pregnancy is aborted.
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