Decease… Death… Die…

One more example which shows how sometimes can be difficult to have a business with the genetic information. There are illnesses which are incurable by the medicines of the modern medicine and which are developing only in the old age, however the predisposition to them with the high level of accuracy can be detected in the early age. For example, Alzheimer’s disease. So, is it necessary to propose a person (who has similar illnesses in his family) performing of the corresponding genetic test? And if the test has detected the predisposition to the incurable illness, which will develop, for example, in 50 years, is it necessary to inform him about this?

Nowadays, it became evident that the information can have not small commercial value. This is in full concerning to the genetic information. In what extent the genetic information can be somebody’s property? The specialists faced with such problem during the preparation of one of the most important international documents, which were called to regulate the development of the genomics and the usage of its achievements – Universal Declaration UNESCO about the human genome and about the rights of the person. In the first versions of this Declaration there was stated that the human genome is the property of the whole mankind. This formulation, however, called enough well-founded complaints because it could be interpreted in that sense that the own genes of every person belong not only to him but the whole mankind. In the final text the formulation was a little bit softened in such a way: “The human genome is a symbol of the mankind’s property”? so that the word “property” was used more exactly in the symbolic sense.

There is no doubt that this problem of the property for the genetic information became in connection with ceaseless debates about patenting of the human’s genes. Some people state that the genetic information is becoming somebody’s property and must be protected by the patent. And everybody who wants to use it, is obligated to pay for this. The patent defense of the intellectual deposit of those who is decoding the genes, will become the strong stimulus for the further progress of the researches. However their antagonists consider that this information was created not that person who has decoded it, but the nature itself (or God), and its owner will be a person in whose genes it was and not a person who retrieved it. And patenting will limit the access of the scientists to the information and thereby will not hasten but put on the breaks the researches.

Of course, for the present the attempts of the medical interference at the genetic level (gene therapy) are bringing more than modest results, so sometimes the scientists are in despair, and the talk about that this way is leading to the blind alley are renewed. Though the methods of the medical influence at the human’s genes are becoming more subtle, refined and various that is signifying the medicine’s progress of itself.