Cathleen Kaveny: Article Analysis

After reading the article by Vayena, a point made by Cathleen Kaveny stood out to me as being a valid argument to why DTC testing could be problematic to the average person’s level of education. She claims that this testing could present, “serious difficulties (for ordinary DTC customers) when engaging in probabilistic reasoning” (Vayena, 312). The difficulties they endure can, “lead them to make harmful decisions” (Vayena, 312). I agree with Kaveny because the majority of people who have this testing done will have an insufficient amount of education to interpret the results properly. This could lead them into making certain decisions such as for example whether to conceive a child or not because of the probability of their child inheriting a disorder

I visited the website before reading any of the articles so that I would have no bias when reading information about their health and ancestry service. I was sold on the idea of DTC testing at first because of the affordable price tag, and the website made me feel like I was missing out on valuable information if I did not have this testing done. After reading the articles and returning to the website once again, I felt that the information presented on the website was very misleading to me. In the carrier status reports informational section, it discusses probability of developing a condition depending on the amount of carriers for a genetic variant. The fine print then says that the tests will not tell you anything regarding your risk for the future development of diseases. These two pieces of information clash in this specific case and led me to developing a much more skeptical view of DTC testing. The information needs to be presented in a much clearer way and it makes me wonder what percentage of this company and others alike have obtained customers on the basis of misleading