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

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  54
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.
By using the example of " snake-oil salesmen" , the author intends to emphasize that
选项 A、the results of genetic tests may fall into hands of dishonest people
B、the salesmen of genetic tests are malicious like snakes
C、the prediction of genetic tests are largely misleading nonsense
D、legislation should be strengthened to prevent the abuse of genetic test results
答案D
解析 通过题干中的线索词锁定原文第五段。本题也是对第五段中一个细节点的考查。第五段的第五句话作者提到夸夸其谈的销售员可能会向顾客承诺自己可以预测顾客的孩子是否会成为体育冠军。很明显基因测试结果不可能预测一个孩子有没有可能成为世界冠军，因此这个例子表明基因测试的结果有时候只是夸夸其谈，可能会被心怀不轨的人利用。有人因此觉得[A]和[C]是正确的。但是要注意这里考查的是作者的意图，根据上下文，作者举这个例子的真正意图是想要强调对基因测试可能导致的诈骗行为的立法的重要性，因此[D]为准确答案。
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