Professor Don Chalmers
Law and the genetics revolution
‘What we are doing is looking at the ethical, legal and social implications of the genetics revolution. Over a fifty year period a group of scientists around the world answered the challenge to actually map the human genome, to take those 3 billion base pairs and understand how those genes interact to make us what we are.
If we actually know that the code tells us who you are - should the immigration department have access to that information? What happens if we suddenly find out there’s a particular gene which will tells us that you are more likely to be successful at sport than others? Or we start to find out that those genes or genetic traces also tell us something about what will happen in the future with disease? Should insurance companies have access to this information? Should employers know about this?
The work that we do inevitably links to work and advice which is actually taken up by government which I think is the most exciting part.’