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Imagine a world where your doctor could help you avoid sickness, using knowledge of your genes as well as how you live your life

admin2014-09-05  57
问题     Imagine a world where your doctor could help you avoid sickness, using knowledge of your genes as well as how you live your life. Or where he would prescribe drugs he knew would work and not have debilitating side-effects.
    Such a future is arriving faster than most realise: genetic tests are already widely used to identify patients who will be helped or harmed by certain drugs. And three years ago, in the face of a torrent of new scientific data, a number of new companies set themselves up to interpret this information for customers. Through shop fronts on the internet, anyone could order a testing kit, spit into a tube and send off their DNA—with results downloaded privately at home. Already customers can find out their response to many common medications, such as antivirals and blood-thinning agents. They can also explore their genetic likelihood of developing deep-vein thrombosis, skin cancer or glaucoma.
    The industry has been subject to conflicting criticisms. On the one hand, it stands accused of offering information too dangerous to trust to consumers; on the other it is charged with peddling irrelevant, misleading nonsense. For some rare disorders, such as Huntington’s and Tay-Sachs, genetic information is a diagnosis. But most diseases are more complicated and involve several genes, or an environmental component, or both. Someone’s chance of getting skin cancer, for example, will depend on whether he worships the sun as well as on his genes.
    America’s Government Accountability Office(GAO)report also revealed what the industry has openly admitted for years: that results of disease-prediction tests from different companies sometimes conflict with one another, because there is no industry-wide agreement on standard lifetime risks.
    Governments hate this sort of anarchy and America’s, in particular, is considering regulation. But three things argue against wholesale regulation. First, the level of interference needs to be based on the level of risk a test represents. The government does not need to be involved if someone decides to trace his ancestry or discover what type of earwax he has. Second,the laws on fraud should be sufficient to deal with the snake-oil salesmen who promise to predict,say,whether a child might be a sporting champion. And third, science is changing very fast. Fairly soon, a customer’s whole genome will be sequenced, not merely the parts thought to be medically relevant that the testing companies now concentrate on, and he will then be able to crank the results through open-source interpretation software downloadable from anywhere on the planet. That will create problems, but the only way to stop that happening would be to make it illegal for someone to have his genome sequenced—and nobody is seriously suggesting that illiberal restriction.
    Instead, then, of reacting in a hostile fashion to the trend for people to take genetic tests, governments should be asking themselves how they can make best use of this new source of information. Restricting access to tests that inform people about bad reactions to drugs could do harm. The real question is not who controls access, but how to minimise the risks and maximise the rewards of a useful revolution.
Current genetic tests are able to______.
选项 A、identify customers’ response to common medications
B、diagnose customers’ health state in the future
C、judge customers’ genetic inclination to some diseases
D、find the cause for some diseases, such as glaucoma
答案A
解析 基因测试的功能主要在原文第二段论及。第二段第四句话提到基因测试的结果能够帮助顾客发现他们对许多普通药物的反应。这里注意“许多”这个词，选项中的[C]乍一看和原文内容一致，但是没有“许多”一词，显得过于绝对。第二段第五句话提到基因测试还能够检测客户未来可能患某些疾病的可能性。这里特别注意“可能性”这个词，基因测试的结果只是一种预测，不能直接作为诊断结果，因此[B]说基因测试能够对客户未来的健康状况作出诊断，是不正确的。[A]为正确选项。[D]偷换概念。
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