ISG faculty Dr. Stefan Timmermans describes how “giving parents a torrent of information about a child’s genetic disease risk will profoundly change the experience of bringing a new life into the world”.
He writes, “Opening up newborn screening for genetics has mostly been viewed as an issue of technological capacity: Is the technology sufficiently fast and reliable to make genetic screening feasible for health purposes? But a study I conducted of recent experiences with the expansion of newborn screening shows that incorporating new technologies can produce a host of unintended consequences for families.”