by | December 19, 2011

On The Old Saw: That Personalized Medicine Will Cost Money In Theory But Will Be A Money-Saver In Practice*

June, 2011 marked the 10th anniversary of the great ‘Mission Accomplished’ moment of the Human Genome Project, when President Clinton, with no regard whatsoever for his own personal safety, stood directly in between Francis Collins and Craig Venter to announce the completion of “the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind.”  In November, in honor of the occasion, the American Museum of Natural History, in partnership with the Council for Responsible Genetics, hosted a panel discussion entitled “The Human Genome and Human Health – Will the Promise Be Fulfilled?”  This was an opportunity for four very smart people to recap the discussion of everything that hasn’t happened as predicted in the last 10 years (Oh, the missing heredity!  Oh, the shortcomings of personal genomics!) and why, in retrospect, this was all entirely predictable, as things generally are in retrospect.  And then the two scientists on the panel predicted that we are on the cusp of great things and the two social scientists on the panel warned that great things come at a steep price and we all agreed, and why not?  After all, we almost always are, and they almost always do.

The thing about making predictions is that it is hard to get it wrong if you go with generalities (it’s always something!) and even harder to get it right, if you are going after specifics.  Thousands of people will have a heart attack this year.  The guy sitting in front of you with the ten pounds of jelly donut hanging over his belt buckle?  Hard to say.  So we in the prognostication business cling to certain reliable, gospel truths.  Technology will get faster and cheaper every year!  Understanding pathophysiology will lead to cures!  You will meet a tall, dark, handsome stranger!  No – sorry, that one isn’t us.  New studies will illuminate the relationship between genotype and phenotype!  Hallelujah.

Here’s another one: personalized medicine will save us money!  Can I get an amen?  It’s something we hear all the time, in medical journals and newspapers and political speeches.  “The savings from personalized medicine,” said a man in the audience at the panel discussion, nodding his head with conviction, “how soon we will see that?”

“Well,” said Dr. Robert Green, renowned neurogeneticist from Beantown (Hah-vard, of course) “I am not convinced that it will save us money.  I think it might cost us money.”  You could almost hear the band stop playing.

Is he right?  The Personalized Medicine Coalition cites savings as one of the intrinsic advantages:  “The cost of health care in the United States is on an unsustainable upward climb. Incorporating personalized medicine into the fabric of the health care system can help resolve many embedded inefficiencies, such as trial-and-error dosing, hospitalizations due to adverse drug reactions, late diagnoses, and reactive treatments.” (The Case For Personalized Medcicine, 3rd Edition.)

But think about it.  Someone comes into your office carrying their personal genomic printout from 23andMe or Navigenics or whoever comes next.  They have an increased risk of Condition X.  What do you suggest?  Step 1: increased screening and testing.  Well maybe the testing modalities are not that good.  Too bad.  You suggest them anyway, because it is downright cruel to tell a person they have an increased risk of the dreaded Condition X and that THERE IS NOTHING TO DO ABOUT IT.  Why do we send people who are BRCA 1 or 2 positive for bi-annual screening of their ovaries?  Because it is a great screening test?  Noooo.  Because it is all we have to offer?  Bingo.

And remember, that printout is going to contain multiple increased risks.  So, step 2: return to step 1, and repeat.

Now, conversely, someone comes into your office with a paper saying that they have a decreased risk of Condition Y.  Do you tell them to stop doing screening?  Skip their annual physical?  Start smoking cigarettes?  Noooo.  Because you know perfectly well that SOMEONE with exactly this genotype is going to get Condition Y, and you don’t want to be responsible if it turns out to be THIS GUY (see Paragraph 2 on the challenges of prognostication).

We are forgetting the medical equivalent of Moore’s Law: that visits to the doctor result inevitably in EXPONENTIALLY MORE VISITS TO THE DOCTOR.  Call it Dr. Moore’s Law: Medical Care Generates Additional Medical Care at a Rate that is Exponential.

Now, please, don’t get me wrong.  I realize that, at times, personalized medicine is going to save us money.  Pharmacogenetics improving the use of medication will save time, money, and lives.  Preventing certain forms of chronic disease like diabetes, if we find a way to intervene for those most at risk, will save a fortune.  But right now, the savings are much more speculative than the costs.  A reflexive adherence to the dogma that personalized medicine saves money creates a hype that can only lead to disappointment.  Making medicine better is a huge goal: making medicine solvent is too much to ask of any fledgling field.  Feeding the hype is tempting, because it generates the sort of excitement that brings in attention and funding.  But ultimately, propagating a dogma that generates unrealistic expectations will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, as our real-life success stories are weighed against the myths of our own making.

*Gratuitous Kant reference.  Philosophy students: please enjoy.

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by | December 13, 2011

Guest Post: YouTube It!

BY JUSTIN LORENTZ

Justin Lorentz is a genetic counselling student completing his second and final year of his MSc at McGill University. Before entering the world of genetic counselling he studied at the University of Waterloo and in 2010 graduated with a BSc in Molecular Biology and Biotechnology. He is a member of both the NSGC and CAGC and has been actively involved in Genetic Counselling Awareness Week since its infancy. Justin manages a Twitter account under geneharbinger which is dedicated to the field of medical genetics and genomics.

As a genetic counselling student it can be tough trying to stay on top of the seemingly exponential learning curve that marks our graduate program. In an attempt to ride this curve I find myself processing and digesting a lot of information about genetic conditions. The strategy I use to make sure this information is absorbed and retained is somewhat multidimensional in that I gather different forms of media to learn the same thing. For example I may look at Wikipedia (you do it too), I read through books, I browse through the literature, print off pictures on Google images, and I have even been known to listen to podcasts.

One day during class, the disorders under the umbrella of Limb Girdle Muscular Dystrophy (LGMD) came up and our lecturer mentioned how a patient’s gait, among many other things, can act as a clue in making a diagnosis. The lecturer was not willing to demonstrate a gait characteristic of someone with LGMD and, after mentally sifting through my usual research schema; I realized I would need to get creative if I was going to actually see this gait.

That night I went home and I typed “Limb Girdle Muscular Dystrophy” into the YouTube search bar and to my surprise I got plenty of results. The main contributor was a user named John71377 AKA John Graybill, a 34 year-old man who has LGMD type 2A. When I visited his YouTube channel here my interest was in his gait, but after watching the first 30 seconds of a video I didn’t care about that anymore. John showed me a little about his life that I would never see in a clinic or read in a textbook. As I sifted through over 30 videos of him demonstrating how he gets out of bed, goes up and down stairs, and how he stands up from a seat, I realized I would never forget about LGMD. To this day I see John when I think of this condition.

John Graybill’s YouTube channel. The current video is a demonstration and description of how John walks. On the left are his other videos that include demonstrations of how John get goes up and down stairs, rises from the ground, etc.

Comments posted in response to one of John Graybill’s videos.

I quickly realized that John’s goal in making his videos was not to show genetic counselling students how he walks; instead it was to help other people with muscular dystrophies like LGMD by sharing tips and advice about how he has overcome his limitations. In addition to his videos he advertises his website he created to raise awareness about LGMD, particularly type 2A. After looking at the comments on his channel, and then watching him on a PBS special I am confident he has been successful.

After “meeting” John, I wanted to see if there were other people who have shared their life with a genetic condition on YouTube. In a matter of seconds I “met” Jim who has myotonia congenita. He posted this video with the intention of educating the public about his condition. He shows how his body reacts when he moves rapidly and he explains how he can overcome the limitations of his condition through stretching. Then I “met” Elliot Adler, a 10 year old boy who has Charcot-Marie Tooth (CMT). With the help of his mom, he created this video raising awareness for CMT. He says that the more people who know about his feet means the better the chances of finding a cure.

Although the intentions of these videos are different, I saw similarities when I looked at the comments written about them. From what I have seen, there have always been comments from other YouTube members who could personally relate to the videos because they had a friend or relative with the same condition or because they have it themselves. Almost every comment provided support, and sometimes members would even network and share email addresses.

It is important to note that the people watching these videos are not just those who can personally relate to them. Furthermore, it is not just people with genetic conditions that are making these videos. Patient organizations such as the Canadian SADS Foundation have harnessed the power of YouTube and create videos like this one to educate the general population, spread awareness, and raise money for research.

YouTube is being used everyday as an educational tool for patient organizations, for patients with genetic conditions, and for the occasional medical genetics practitioner. It might be time for the genetic counselling community to begin thinking about whether there is a place for YouTube in their practice. YouTube videos made by organizations pose many of the same benefits and limitations as websites made by organizations. Personal YouTube videos in many ways are like personal websites, and similar disclaimers may apply if they were ever to come up in a session. But like how reading a book provides a different experience than watching a movie; viewing a website on LGMD will provide an experience that cannot be compared to seeing someone with LGMD move through their house. YouTube can be a powerful resource in this field (for better or for worse).

What information does YouTube have on your field of genetic counselling? It might be good to check it out. I bet some of your patients have done just that already.

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by | December 4, 2011

The Implicit Judeo-Christian Ethic of Pedigree Nomenclature

I am  unabashedly the pedigree’s biggest fan.* Although those new-fangled              ”-omics” testing technologies may soon surpass the analytic power of the pedigree, I suspect that pedigrees will be a critical part of genetic counseling for as long as it is practiced in its current form.

I have resisted using family history questionnaires because for most patients those questionnaires probably just feel like homework assignments. Besides, I am not convinced that questionnaires really save much clinic time. More critically, the process of constructing a pedigree provides great insight into a patient’s understanding of genetics, disease, and family dynamics.  And, truth be told, a questionnaire lacks a pedigree’s minimalist elegance and concise pictorial encapsulation of complex information. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe would have embraced the simple rhythmic modularity of a multi-generation pedigree.

But pedigrees are not measures of scientific realities like the speed of light in a vacuum or the Avogadro constant. Pedigree nomenclature is a product of  the sociocultural background of the geneticists who devised it. Pedigree symbols were formalized a century ago by scientists (eugenicists, if we are to be honest about it) raised in the Western Judeo-Christian tradition, a tradition that reflects

An Australian Aborigine kinship system

the background of many current genetic counselors.

The sociocultural biases of pedigree nomenclature are most apparent in its limits. So, what are some of those limitations and what do they have to tell us?

Simply put, pedigree nomenclature functions best for people who have one mating partner for life as well as for kindreds with few or no consanguineous matings, and further assumes that people can be neatly placed into one of two discrete gender categories.

Let me expand on these points. Pedigrees are best suited for a simple family structure that broadly reflects the Christian ideal of a single spouse for life. Sure, pedigrees are capable of including a second partner, but they quickly grow into a mess of confusingly angled lines and icons when someone has more than two mating relationships. This problem is compounded when the proband’s relatives also have multiple mates.

In some non-Western societies, people are expected to marry their cousins whereas Westernized societies generally stigmatize consanguineous matings. Christianity grudgingly allows for the occasional cousin marriage but marrying a first cousin can require special dispensation from the Vatican. Frequent cousin marriages within a family are discouraged. The pedigree of a patient whose family includes multiple generations of consanguineous matings is a complex web of double mating lines and hooked or crisscrossed lines of descent. Such families are better described by inbreeding coefficients than by ideograms.

Pedigree nomenclature also assumes that people are either male or female, just like God created Adam and Eve. This is a peculiar assumption, considering that intersex individuals are not uncommonly encountered in the genetics clinic. It is probably more accurate to say that gender and sexuality represent a spectrum, with male heterosexual at one end and female heterosexual at the other. Yes, I know that the nomenclature allows for the depiction of people who may not phenotypically, socially, or genetically fit neatly into either male or female. But the technique is awkward, and was developed almost a century after pedigrees had become part of the genetics toolkit. They are literally square pegs in round holes.

There are other subtle psychological aspects of pedigree nomenclature. For example, it reinforces mendelian and reductionist views of complex biological phenomena. Those neat arrangements of squares, circles, and lines can  

Pedigree nomenclature of the Eugenics Record Office, Cold Spring Harbor.

subconsciously seduce the clinician to think “Oh it must be a dominant condition with variable penetrance or reduced expressivity” or “With all those inbreeding loops it surely must be a recessive trait.” When you construct a figure intended to illustrate mendelism, everything starts to look mendelian. And, as eugenicists knew all too well, the ability of those dark and light geometric shapes to reify cultural constructs like feeble-mindedness or pauperism can make the pedigree a magnificently effective propaganda device.

Don’t get me wrong. I do not advocate eliminating pedigrees from the clinic or changing the nomenclature. Far from it. Hey, I was part of the group that established standards for modern pedigree nomenclature. But we must be willing to make the difficult acknowledgment that pedigrees are not objective scientific tools that take honest and accurate measure of biological traits. All kinship systems  reflect the culture that developed them. Pedigrees are the product of geneticists, with all of their faults, prejudices, strengths, and humanity.

____________________________________________

* - Okay, maybe I am second to Robin Bennett.

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by | November 20, 2011

Canadians celebrate 2nd Annual Genetic Counselling Awareness Week

This week (November 20-26) genetic counsellors across Canada will be participating in the 2nd annual Genetic Counselling Awareness Week (see my post on this topic last year.) The theme for this year’s event is centered around dispelling common myths about genetics.

For a 2nd year in a row I am serving as a co-chair for this initiative, and for the second year in a row I am blown away by the amount of work and thought that GCs have put in to ensuring this week is a success.  Even seemingly simple events, such as organizing a trivia night or movie screening, require an incredible amount of planning and coordination. GCs in Canada are taking time out of their busy lives and are volunteering their time and expertise.

I am hoping to put together a follow-up post after this week is over, with a ‘behind the scenes’ look at GC Awareness Week, in the hopes that it might provide some insight and incentive for other countries to follow suit. But for now I will just leave you with some highlights of what is coming up this week:

  • Genetic Counsellors in Edmonton, Alberta and Winnipeg, Manitoba will be featured on local news programs.
  • Groups in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Ottawa, Ontario will each be hosting a trivia night at a local pub. The GCs in Winnipeg are hosting a similarly themed evening, using clips from popular television shows, to help dispel common myths about genetics.
  • Multiple movie screenings will be occurring across the country. Films being screened this year include: In the Family, Extraordinary Measures, GATTACA and At My Mother’s Breast. In most cases, a genetic counsellor panel discussion will follow.
  • Several centres will be setting up information booths within their institution, in order to liaise directly with patients and hospital staff.
  • Rumor has it an Alberta-based group will be putting together a fun-loving You Tube video this year. Click here for last year’s video from GCs at North York General Hospital.

For a full list of events and info, visit the GC Awareness Week website.

Want to help spread the word? Pass along any relevant info to family members and friends who live in Canada, or use the designated hashtags #GCAwarenessWeek #geneticcounselling and #CAGC when tweeting about GCAW or GC-related issues throughout the week.

Image credit: TheFutureisUnwritten (link to image here)

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by | November 6, 2011

Sense, Missense, and Nonsense: A Word Nerd’s Freewheeling Take On The Vocabulary of Genetics

I proudly admit to being a Word Nerd, a hound who sniffs a trail on a random dictionary page for the sheer pleasure of flushing out obscure words. Today’s finds were haček, hachure, and hackbut. So let me combine two of my passions – words and genetic counseling – and share a few irreverently serious thoughts on some selections from the genetics lexicon.

Genetic Counselor –This professional title is just plain wrong. We should more properly be called genetics counselors, i.e., those who counsel about genetics.  The s-less form gives the impression that being a counselor is the result of a hereditary predisposition towards counseling (“I’m sorry,” she said to the patient after an overly long counseling session, “Sometimes I can’t stop myself from counseling. It must be genetic.”). A health professional who counsels about diabetes is called a diabetes counselor, not a diabetic counselor. Unless of course you were describing a counselor who happens to have diabetes.  Hey NSGC – time for you to take the lead on this one and change the name of our profession, though I shudder to think of the impact on the fine print of those state licensure laws.

Chimaera vs. Chimera. I prefer the  “ae” spelling because “ae” words are uncommon in American English and its occurrence in the middle of the word makes it look like a hybrid word, just as a chimaera is a rare and unusual genetic hybrid. The word comes from the mythological fire-breathing female creature said to be the product of an incestuous union and is an anatomic pastiche of a lion, a goat, and a serpent. It is derived from the Greek khimaira, a year old she-goat. Its earliest use in English, in the 16th century, meant “wild fantasy.” The chimaera fish is a member of the Chimaeridae, a class of cartilaginous fishes. Given these connotations, the term is insensitive and evokes a sideshow spectacle. If I were someone who were chimaeric, I would lobby for a new designation for this phenomenon when it occurs in humans.

Meiosis/Mitosis. It is blatantly unfair and inconsiderate that two words that describe processes broadly similar in outline but critically different in detail and outcome should have easily confused names. When I learned about cellular division, I resorted to the mnemonic “Meiosis has an ‘e’, and ‘e’ is the first letter in egg; thus, eggs undergo meiosis, not mitosis.”  It also helps to know that meiosis comes from the Greek word for “lessening,” reflecting its characteristic reduction division (though during mitosis the amount of DNA doubles from 2N to 4N and then reduces to 2N…Oh, never mind). The great 19th century German biologist Walther Flemming coined mitosis after his observations of the dividing gill and fin cells of a salamander. Mitosis derives from the Greek word for “thread,” presumably referring to the dividing cell’s threadlike chromatin.  The Online Etymology Dictionary translates the Greek a bit differently as “warped threads.” Warped Threads would be a good name for a Seattle alt band that sings quirky songs about salamanders (“Newt Is A Real Salamander”), Greek letters (“I Was Just Your Beta-Test Boyfriend”), and 19th century German biologists (“Virchow’s Virtues”).

Oocyte. I admit I like this one strictly because it’s fun to say, and to play with different pronunciations – “ooo-cytes” “oh-oh-cytes” “oh-uh-cytes” or, perhaps if an egg cell develops abnormally, “uh-oh-cytes.” As an added bonus, the o-shape that the mouth makes when saying the word evokes the shape of an egg cell. I am not a fan of oogonia or oogonium (or their even more awkward cousins, spermatogonia and spermatogonium). Oogonia sounds like an ancient continent, as in  “During the Jurassic Period, tectonic forces broke up Gondwana into several smaller continents, including Oogonia, where only female dinosaurs thrived.” Oogonium could be a rare mineral as in “Oogonium mining resulted in contaminated ground water that was responsible for mutations in the oocytes of exposed field mice.”

Kindred, Kinship. While there is nothing wrong with pedigree – that old crane’s foot of a word – kindred and kinship are snazzier, a syllable shorter, and permit the Teutonic pleasure of the “k” sound. It also evokes a spirit of unity (the whole family is on this ship together and united by a special bond, as in kindred spirits). Besides, everybody thinks of dogs and horses when they hear pedigree, whereas kinship and kindred are usually only applied to humans. The related term sibship rolls off the tongue nicely too.

Products of Conception. This wins the Silver Medal for the coldest and most insensitive pregnancy-related term; the Gold goes to habitual aborter (both sound suspiciously like terms created by men for women). I recognize that it tries to communicate the idea that pregnancy includes a fetus as well as membranes and a placenta. But the term robs pregnancy of its emotional richness and sounds like a Marxist critique of a capitalist pregnancy factory where the female proletariat manufacture babies to generate profits for the owners.

Primitive Streak. I am fond of this one because it communicates the ancientness of this vertebrate biological structure. I am not the only one intrigued by this name. The Subdudes 1996 CD bears this title. It is also the name of a coolly outrageous clothing line developed by fashion designer Helen Storey and her sister Kate Storey, a developmental biologist. Their creations realize the early stages of embryonic development in fabric, and include such items as a dress featuring two sperm-shaped breast plates and a stunning white fake fur neurulation dress.

Genetic Drift. This term, attributed to the great geneticist Sewall Wright, clearly and non-technically evokes the word’s meaning without resorting to pedantic combinations of Greek words. You hear “genetic drift” and you immediately grasp what it refers to – random fluctuations in gene frequencies over time and populations, the evolutionary equivalent of Brownian motion. Genetic Drift was also the name of a wonderful series of genetics essays written by Larry Karp in the American Journal of Medical Genetics in the early 1980s and which were one of the inspirations for me to blog about genetics.

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by | October 16, 2011

The Unusual Suspects: Wedgwood Pottery, The Canals of England, And The Death of God

God is dead…..And we have killed him.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche’s madman infamously proclaimed the demise of God in his 1882 work The Gay Science. Nietzsche was presumably dramatizing the idea that belief in God and the pervasive influence of Christianity in Europeans’ daily lives had ebbed throughout the 19th century.

Grant me permission to sidestep the heated debates among deists, theists, scientists, atheists, and all the other “-ists”  about the existence of God and let me indulge in a bit of fanciful post-mortem speculation about the real culprits responsible for the Supreme Deity’s untimely death – the canals of England and Wedgwood pottery.

I want to be clear up front – part of my theory is unabashedly lifted directly from Simon Winchester’s excellent book The Map That Changed The World. The  speculation about the role of Wedgwood pottery is my unique contribution.

Throughout the Middle Ages and up until the 18th century, much of the Christian world believed in the literal interpretation of The Bible. In this view, the Earth was created at 9 AM on a fine Sunday morning on October 23rd, 4004 BC, as calculated in 1650 by James Ussher, the Anglican bishop of Armagh in Northern Ireland.  By the start of the 18th century, the annotated pages of the King James Bible included Ussher’s dating for every biblical event. For example, a good Christian could open the Bible to the story of Noah and in the margins read that the Great Flood began on the 17th day of the second month in the 600th year after the creation of the Earth.

But the supremacy of the Bible soon came under scientific scrutiny. The late 18th century saw the rise of England’s Industrial Revolution, the shift from cottage based industries and farming to large factories that manufactured textiles and other goods on a previously unimagined scale. England suddenly needed huge quantities of coal to be transported quickly and cheaply, which led to the construction of a complex network of canals for carrying coal on horse-drawn barges from the mines to the factories.

Canal construction required the land to be surveyed to determine the best route for the waterways. William Smith, a key figure in the history of geology, surveyed the canals in the Somerset coalfields. As Smith studied the layers of earth in the coal pits, he realized that these strata could be identified in the same order in widely separated parts of England and that each stratum contained a unique set of fossils arranged in a predictable and orderly fashion from oldest to youngest. Smith eventually produced the first stratigraphic map of England, which provided  graphic evidence that the Earth must be considerably older than Ussher’s 6,000 year estimate. The first cracks started to appear in the rock solid Biblical view of the world.

The crippling blow to the literal interpretation of the Bible had its seed planted in 1769 when Josiah Wedgwood opened Etruria, his great pottery factory near Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire. Wedgwood realized that canals were a more cost-effective means of transporting clay to his factory and a far safer means of transporting his fragile products to their sales outlets. Wedgwood convinced Erasmus Darwin, his good friend and the eventual grandfather of Charles Darwin, to join him in investing in the construction of a  system of canals running from the countryside to major cities.

These shrewd investments led to the Wedgwood and Darwin families becoming among the wealthiest in England. Charles Darwin’s father, Robert, united the families’ fortunes when he married Susannah Wedgwood, daughter of Josiah Wedgwood. Charles himself further entwined the wealth of the two families by marrying his cousin Emma Wedgwood.

This vast wealth directly paid for Darwin’s Beagle explorations, and also allowed him to avoid the shackles of employment and to lead the leisurely life of a wealthy country gentleman as he spent decades meticulously developing his theory of evolution. As Darwin acutely understood, the 1859 publication of  The Origin of Species shocked the world, and still generates intense debate today. Whatever side one takes on these arguments, Darwin’s work shook many peoples’ beliefs in the literal interpretation of the Bible and the role of the Christian church in their perception of the world around them.

As Gil Grissom and the CSI crew know, solving a crime can be complicated and require making some not-so-obvious connections.

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by | October 4, 2011

Cross-Cultural Genetic Services

I have enjoyed the opportunity to be a part of this wonderful blog as an author.

I am leaving for Kenya where I will serve as a Peace Corps Volunteer for 2 years. I will serve as a Deaf Educator at a school for the deaf. I will also be a Behavior Communicator and will work with HIV/AIDS prevention within the deaf/hard-of-hearing community in Kenya.

I will also have a 3rd project which can be anything we want to do. Since genetic counseling is one of my passion I want to make my 3rd project something that has to do with genetic counseling. I would love to hear your input regarding genetic services in different countries and what we can learn from it.

While I am stepping down from this blog as an author, I do hope to continue to blog as a guest providing I have Internet access in Kenya.

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by | September 4, 2011

My Mind’s Made Up

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by | August 11, 2011

Genetic Counseling and the Disability Community: A Cautionary Tale

A commentary by Anne Madeo, Barbara Biesecker, Campbell Brasington, Lori Erby and Kathryn Peters in the August issue of the American Journal of Medical Genetics (The Relationship Between the Genetic Counseling Profession and the Disability Community) is going to raise some hackles because it takes on the most sacred cow in genetic counseling: the belief, bordering on dogma, that genetic counselors are good.  Not just good as in the absence of bad, or good like ice cream and lazy Sundays, but good in the dare-I-say religious sense.  Good-doing.  Doers of good.  Beyond well-intentioned, because well-intentioned suggests that one might do the wrong thing by accident.  Genetic counselors are trained good-doers, there to protect and rescue patients from the less finely calibrated ministrations of other medical professionals, particularly doctors.

The perfidy of doctors is sometimes a corollary to the gospel of genetic counseling, in which it is stated that genetic counselors do good.

But I digress.  And while I am digressing, let me hasten to add that I think genetic counselors are as nice as group of people as I have ever known.  And I am not just saying that because I don’t want to get nasty looks at the next NSGC conference; I mean it.  Genetic counselors are as a rule neither cynical nor uncaring, and I have found them to be absolutely dedicated to doing right by their patients.

But you can’t do right by all people all of the time, not if you believe that doing right means supporting them in whatever they decide.  You can’t.  Let’s say a woman carrying a fetus with Down Syndrome arrives in your office.  So now you have a tightrope to walk.  Because if she decides to terminate but has the least degree of uncertainty or guilt, any positive remarks you make about DS kids (They are cute, aren’t they?  And the new research is promising…) is likely to echo in her ears as a reproach.  And if she decides to keep the baby, any negative remark you make about DS kids (They do have a lot of medical issues one should really mention…right?  And lots of people in her shoes would terminate…) is likely to be remembered as proof that the genetics people thought my baby – my baby! – should have been aborted.

Genetic counseling – if it was easy, everybody would do it.  Madeo and company don’t attack genetic counselors, nor do they underestimate the complex balancing act involved in this counseling scenario.  They do suggest that the few available studies suggest that counselors and the NSGC have been more involved with protecting women’s rights to terminate and reassuring those that do, rather than protecting the rights and interests of persons with disabilities.  Of course, this is in part because it is abortion rights that have been under siege.  They quote Arthur Caplan from 2009, advocating activism in a phrase that syntactically ties the anti-abortion movement with Naziism:  “If counselors do not speak up on behalf of their clients, who will?”  True, the authors say, and yet, they suggest– is it hard to understand that many parents of children with DS feel their babies are under siege as well?  There aren’t as many as there used to be.  They call that threatening.  We call it success (yes we do.  Be honest.  Improving our prenatal screening is not about giving parents the chance to know in advance that they are having a kid with DS.  And if it was, insurance wouldn’t pay for it).  So they would like to balance the equation. “If counselors do not also speak up on behalf of clients who choose not to terminate a pregnancy, then who will?” the authors ask of us.  “If counselors do not also speak up on behalf of clients with disabilities, then who will?

A response by the NSGC for the most part focuses on rebutting the charges that either the organization or its members fails to recognize its special obligation to those affected by genetic syndromes and genetic disease.  NSGC President Karin Dent does an admirable job detailing the position statements, collaborations, educational outreach efforts that document our commitment to people with disabilities.  We are trying, the thing says!  We do so much!  But there is something about this primarily defensive posture that denies the essence of the problem.  Defensiveness is our Achilles heel.  “I’m just a soul whose intentions are good” sings Bob Resta in his accompanying commentary, “Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.”

As Resta correctly suggests, defensiveness over the issue of whether or not we are fair may be leading us to miss the central issue of this drama: DS births aren’t just going down, they are going down selectively.  Some communities and demographics have better access to screening and intervention; others are more willing to use them.  This is true of DS today, as it will be true of many other screening programs in the future.  The very things that in our lifetimes have been the sort of thing that can happen to anyone (there but for the grace of god go I…) are becoming the sort of thing that only happen to “some people.”

“Imagine yourself in our shoes,” writes Patricia Bauer, the mother of a girl with DS, “as the question hangs in the air at neighborhood gatherings, at the park, at the supermarket. ‘‘Didn’t you have the test?’’ someone asks, eyeing our child’s face with a raised eyebrow that seems to betray surprise, curiosity, disapproval…. If you had been a responsible parent, they seem to say, wouldn’t you have exercised your legal right to abort…”

Lurking in her words is a sociological issue of enormous proportions, one where we may exercise our board-certified ability to do good, if we can stop making the issue all about us.

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