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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  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.
According to the author,what should the government do about genetic test?
选项 A、Inform the public of the risk of it.
B、Legitimate the access to it.
C、Control the access to it.
D、Intervene when necessary.
答案D
解析 作者在最后一段明确提出了政府在基因测试行业管制中应该扮演的角色。[A]中出现了干扰词inform，但是稍加判断，即可得知[A]虽然符合常识，但是原文并未提及。[B]无中生有，全文都没有提到基因测试是不合法的，因此使其合法化无从谈起。[C]断章取义，control access是干扰词，但原文说的是“重要的不是control access”，因此错误。[D]正确，原文第五段中提到了政府干预的问题，如果检测者只是想知道一些关于家族疾病史的知识，那么政府就不应干预，暗含的意思就是在必要的时候政府干预还是可行的。并且第六段最后一句话也说到政府应该在最大程度上降低基因测试行业的风险，充分利用这一新技术给人类带来的好处。
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