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  3. Imagine a world where your doctor could help you avoid sickness, using knowledge of your genes as well as how you live your life

Imagine a world where your doctor could help you avoid sickness, using knowledge of your genes as well as how you live your life

admin2014-09-05  41
问题     Imagine a world where your doctor could help you avoid sickness, using knowledge of your genes as well as how you live your life. Or where he would prescribe drugs he knew would work and not have debilitating side-effects.
    Such a future is arriving faster than most realise: genetic tests are already widely used to identify patients who will be helped or harmed by certain drugs. And three years ago, in the face of a torrent of new scientific data, a number of new companies set themselves up to interpret this information for customers. Through shop fronts on the internet, anyone could order a testing kit, spit into a tube and send off their DNA—with results downloaded privately at home. Already customers can find out their response to many common medications, such as antivirals and blood-thinning agents. They can also explore their genetic likelihood of developing deep-vein thrombosis, skin cancer or glaucoma.
    The industry has been subject to conflicting criticisms. On the one hand, it stands accused of offering information too dangerous to trust to consumers; on the other it is charged with peddling irrelevant, misleading nonsense. For some rare disorders, such as Huntington’s and Tay-Sachs, genetic information is a diagnosis. But most diseases are more complicated and involve several genes, or an environmental component, or both. Someone’s chance of getting skin cancer, for example, will depend on whether he worships the sun as well as on his genes.
    America’s Government Accountability Office(GAO)report also revealed what the industry has openly admitted for years: that results of disease-prediction tests from different companies sometimes conflict with one another, because there is no industry-wide agreement on standard lifetime risks.
    Governments hate this sort of anarchy and America’s, in particular, is considering regulation. But three things argue against wholesale regulation. First, the level of interference needs to be based on the level of risk a test represents. The government does not need to be involved if someone decides to trace his ancestry or discover what type of earwax he has. Second,the laws on fraud should be sufficient to deal with the snake-oil salesmen who promise to predict,say,whether a child might be a sporting champion. And third, science is changing very fast. Fairly soon, a customer’s whole genome will be sequenced, not merely the parts thought to be medically relevant that the testing companies now concentrate on, and he will then be able to crank the results through open-source interpretation software downloadable from anywhere on the planet. That will create problems, but the only way to stop that happening would be to make it illegal for someone to have his genome sequenced—and nobody is seriously suggesting that illiberal restriction.
    Instead, then, of reacting in a hostile fashion to the trend for people to take genetic tests, governments should be asking themselves how they can make best use of this new source of information. Restricting access to tests that inform people about bad reactions to drugs could do harm. The real question is not who controls access, but how to minimise the risks and maximise the rewards of a useful revolution.
The author seems to suggest that the restriction prohibiting customers from having their genome sequenced is______.
选项 A、inhuman and unethical
B、inhuman but legal
C、illiberal but necessary
D、illiberal and oppressive
答案C
解析 本题考查的是对第五段中一个细节点的理解。第五段通过说理论证，说明了为什么政府对基因测试行业的监管需要审慎而为的原因。其中第三条原因就是这里提到的“基因组测序”的问题。现在的基因测试一般只集中在对集中基因的检查上，而不久的将来也许人们就能够对自己整个的基因组进行测序。从字里行间我们可以揣测出作者对于个人测序基因组的态度。人们一定认为自己有权了解自己的基因组排序，但是在这么做会引发一系列问题的情况下，政府只有禁止它。由此可判断，作者承认这种禁止行为是反自由的，但同时又认为它是完全必要的。[C]为正确答案。
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