Opinion: Bioethicists worried patients couldn’t handle their own genetic testing results. They were (mostly) wrong

When the Human Genome Project began in 1990, bioethicists feared that giving people the results of genetic tests would do them a lot more harm than good.

Experts feared that individuals who received genetic information about their future health status would be overwhelmed by depression or anxiety. Or as genetic testing became more widely available, it would increase the stigmatization of people with genetic variants. Others worried that people would turn into genetic essentialists and determinists, seeing themselves and others as nothing more than their genes, helpless to alter their behavior or shape their future.

Those concerns . The first major on the effect of disclosing genetic information found that people who decided to for people who, after a process of informed consent, decided they wanted to receive information about single genes associated with Huntington’s disease and breast and ovarian cancer.