political factor implication of using science in legal cases
Answers
Explanation:
Earlier in this report, the committee addressed the challenges involved in identifying how individual human genes interact with other genes and with social and behavioral factors over time to affect human health. Research that elucidates how social, behavioral, and genetic influences interact to impact health may reveal findings that demonstrate beneficial effects on individuals and their health while other findings on interactions may show harmful effects. This lack of consistency may lead to differing perceptions of the value of research on interactions, which in turn may affect the willingness of researchers to do this work; funders to support it; care providers to act on existing evidence; and the population to embrace the findings. At its best, such findings could ensure that public health practice and medical care are attuned to the complex of factors that are affecting a patient, or an individual might be able to use such information as motivation for his/her own health-promoting behavior. On the other hand, such findings could lead to stigmatization and could have negative effects on the ability of individuals or groups to receive appropriate health care and insurance coverage. Consequently, it is important that transdisciplinary research on the impact on health of interactions among social, behavioral, and genetic factors also encompasses investigations that improve our understanding of how individuals make use of this information and how policymakers and the public interpret such research.
Efforts to address the implications of this type of knowledge are not new. For example, environmental regulation is focused to a large degree on the protection of health. Some of the more difficult issues in that arena concern whose health is to be protected—that of the average person in the population of interest and/or the health of high-risk individuals—as well as how and at what cost. Over the last two decades, much attention has been paid to the social and ethical implications of genetic and genomic information (Murray et al., 1996; Walters and Palmer, 1997; Rothstein, 1997; Rothstein, 2003; Mehlman, 2003). Indeed, the Human Genome Project occasioned the first decision by an institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to designate specific funds to explore the social implications of a project. In this arena, the focus has been broader, ranging from effects on health to discrimination in work and insurance to notions of personal responsibility, including health and criminal law. More recently, these areas of inquiry have begun to merge in consideration of environmental genomics1 and pharmacogenomics2 (Need et al., 2005), both of which are concerned explicitly with interactions. Discussion in the following section builds upon all these discourses, with an emphasis on the implications of the interactions between genetic susceptibility and social and behavioral factors.