Public Policy and Legal Issues Raised by Advances in Genetic Screening and Testing International Symposium on Law and Science at the Crossroads: Biomedical Technology, Ethics, Public Policy, and the Law 27 Suffolk University Law Review 1993

27 Suffolk U. L. Rev. 1327 (1993)
Public Policy and Legal Issues Raised by Advances in Genetic Screening and Testing

handle is hein.journals/sufflr27 and id is 1347 raw text is: PUBLIC POLICY AND LEGAL ISSUES RAISED BY
ADVANCES IN GENETIC SCREENING AND
TESTING
Philip R. Reilly, M.D., J.D.*
I. AN INTRODUCrION TO DNA
Except for some viruses, all organisms, from relatively simple sin-
gle-cell bacteria to humans, each of whom is a marvelous composite of
trillions of cells, are organized by and operate under biochemical rules
encrypted in deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). The most important con-
cepts to grasp about this wonderful molecule are that (1) it carries
immense amounts of information, (2) it has extremely efficient meth-
ods of faithfully copying itself, and (3) it may be altered (mutated), a
process that is quintessential to evolution. A gene, the fundamental
unit which transmits information when a cell divides, is basically a
long stretch of DNA that contains instructions directing the cell to
produce proteins, the chemicals that carry out the life processes of
cells.'
The human genome, providing the full text of hereditary informa-
tion with which each of us starts life at the moment of conception, is
organized as about one hundred thousand pairs of genes that are
packaged in a complex manner on twenty-three pairs of chromo-
somes. The DNA molecules that encode these genes are composed of
about three billion nucleotides, the basic building blocks of DNA.
There are only four different chemical building blocks; in other words,
the DNA alphabet has but four letters. This astounding fact explains
why the human blueprint requires a text that uses billions of letters.
A short alphabet necessitates writing long sentences to send complex
messages.
To give some sense of the amount of information that was in the cell
by which you were conceived, imagine that each nucleotide is the size
of a letter on this page. If each word was on average composed of
ten letters, it would require about three thousand books of one hun-
dred thousand words each to print out the information contained in
* J.D. Columbia University School of Law, 1973; M.D. Yale University School of
Medicine, 1981; B.A. Cornell University 1969. Dr. Reilly is currently the Executive Direc-
tor of The Shriver Center for Mental Retardation, Inc. in Waltham, Massachusetts. From
1989-1993 he was Chairman of the Social Issues Committee of the American Society of
Human Genetics. He is an Assistant Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School.
1. For detailed discussions of the structure and function of genes, see generally JAMES
D. WATSON ET AL., MOLECULAR BIOLOGY OF THE GENE (4th ed. 1987); JAMES D. WAT-
SON ET AL., RECOMBINANT DNA (2d ed. 1992).

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