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LEGAL LAG A In the last 10 or 15 years new genetic discoveries have allowed doctors to tell who is and who is not at risk, and at the same time prescribe treatments for them. What has come with this redefinition is a whole raft of unresolved legal questions. By Stephen Strauss IN MEDICAL ADVANCES decade or two ago you would have been hard-pressed to come up with an area of scientific advance that seemed potentially more legally fraught than medical genetics. Indeed it was so disturbing that three British law profes- sors glumly forecast in the September 1998 issue of The Modern Law Review that "on the face of it the legal community with its tendency toward gentle incrementalism is not particularly well equipped to handle any kind of revolution, let alone a revolution of the proportion indicated by medical genetics" and then went on to quote a newspaper article saying medical genetic advances "will tie the lawyers up in . . . knots." The fear was based on the prevalent belief that knowledge of how genes ted up by genetics-based lawsuits. This is because in 2012 the once exhilarating promise of clinical genetics (now frequently called clinical genomics) is being viewed by many people — including some in the legal profession – as a scientific hype existing somewhere between a fairyland and a fraud. For example, last year Science magazine published an article entitled "Deflating the Today it is highly unlikely any lawyer reading this article is feeling particularly knot- worked was going to radically reconfigure medical practice. John Bell, Nuffield professor of clinical medicine at Oxford University, optimisti- cally opined that same year in the British Medical Journal, that "within the next decade genetic medicine will be used widely for predictive testing in healthy people and for diagnosis and management of patients." And knowing what the genes said was going to require doctors to daily make unprecedented and instant decisions about what should and shouldn't be revealed about genetic information and genetic risks not just to patients, but to patients' families, to insurance companies, to govern- ments, and to employers. www.CANADIAN Lawyermag.com M AY 2012 31 shutterstocK