Tom Harkin: “I am supporting the amendment of the Senator from South Dakota because I have been involved in this issue for a long…”

“I am supporting the amendment of the Senator from South Dakota because I have been involved in this issue for a long time. In 1989, when I was chairman of the subcommittee that my good friend, Senator Specter, chairs now, we started funding for the Human Genome Center at NIH. So I have been involved in this effort for a long time and am very supportive of it. I could not have been happier with the announcement that came out this week that we have now completed the map, and they will be completing the sequencing of the human genome. With that, we are going to have a very powerful diagnostic tool that will allow medical practitioners to more accurately assess the health of an individual and their proclivity to come down with an illness or a disease, or to be more predictive of what kind of illnesses to which a person might be subject. Well, that is a very powerful diagnostic tool, and it is going to do a lot to help millions of people all over this world. There may be other spinoffs in terms of gene therapy, and things such as that, but I wish to focus on the diagnostic tool that will help people get better control over their health care. That is the upside. The downside is that in the hands of the wrong person this information could then be used to discriminate against a person who may have a genetic predisposition toward a certain illness.”