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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  30
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.
It can be inferred from Paragraph 2 to Paragraph 4 that______.
选项 A、Huntington’s and Tay-Sach can be diagnosed by genetic information because they are rare disorders
B、someone who has a lower-than-average genetic risk of skin disease can suffer a terminal skin cancer
C、genetic test companies have tried to justify the uniqueness of their disease-prediction results
D、customers have to order genetic test online because it is illegal in real life
答案B
解析 这是一道综合性推理引申题，考查范围较广，因此难度较大。根据[A]中的线索词可锁定第三段第三句话和第四句话。这一句话提到对于某些罕见疾病，例如Huntington和Tay—Sachs，基因测试的结果本身就是一种诊断，但对于大多数疾病来说，复杂的环境因素也可能成为患病的原因，因此基因测试的结果并不足以成为诊断结果。对比之下，可推理得出基因测试结果之所以能直接诊断Huntington和Tay—Sachs，并不是因为两种疾病是罕见疾病，而是因为它们是单纯受遗传因素影响的疾病。[A]错误。由第三段第四句话同样可以得知一个人罹患皮肤癌的原因是多方面的，有可能是遗传因素影响，也有可能是后天因素影响，因此[B]正确。[C]考查的是对于原文第四段的理解，第四段中提到美国政府问责局最近揭露了一个基因测试行业内早就公开的秘密，那就是各个公司之间的预测结果往往是互相冲突的，因为缺乏统一的行业标准。由此可见这些公司并没有竭力证明自己预测结果的权威性，[C]错误。[D]考查的细节在文中的第二段，第二段中间部分提到了现在顾客很方便地在网上订购自己的基因检测报告，但是并没有提到为什么会在网上操作，[D]属无中生有。
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