Advances in medicine and biology offer great possibilities for future medical procedures and for entirely new procedures such as genetic splicing to create new forms of life for good or ill, and these new capabilities bring with them great responsibility and require that experimentation and development in biology be conducted following ethical precepts. The issues raised are not simple and are not easily answered, making it all the more vital that critical thinking be developed and applied to issues of bioethics. The genetic testing of fetuses to determine whether a child may have cystic fibrosis, some other malady, or mild retardation may seem benign, but in fact it is a potential threat to our liberties.
As a society, we face new problems all the time. In our own time we are faced with the scourge of AIDS, which involves a whole panoply of ethical issues that are unique to this disease, issues such as confidentiality, disclosures, public health, and modes of transmission, as well as issues facing people with other terminal diseases such as the right to die by refusing extraordinary medical measures. Advances in genetics raise issues that are also entirely new. As it becomes possible to predict which children are likely to get certain diseases as they grow older, the question is raised as to whether this means they should be told. Brownlee writes that many of those who have been told of the results of genetic testing "have already found that the price of glimpsing their medical future is high indeed, and with the advent of each new genetic test more and more Americans will face similar dilemmas" (Brownlee 57). Just as there may be a right to know, there may also be a right not to know, not to be told about certain potential problems. At the same time, with problems such as AIDS, the question of whether it is more right to disclose than to protect privacy has been raised again and again:
Who owns genetic information? ...