Ethical Considerations In Clinical Application Of Pharmacogenomics

IN recent years, along with the development of Human Genome Project, people have gradually realized that different individuals have different responses to the identical kind of medicine, and this result is mostly due to the difference of genes. So on the basis of the pharmacogenetics, people have developed the pharmacogenomics, which studies the mechanism of individuals' different responses to the same drug in molecule and gene level. The development has opened the new prospect for the searching of appropriate medicines for the patients and specific crowds and the suitable prescriptions. However, while we are making the expectation to the prospect for the development of pharmacogenomics, the application of this new technology has also inevitably brought in some ethical puzzles to people. This article will, through the analysis of clinical practice situation of the application of pharmacogenomics , discuss how the medical community and the ethical community respectively regard the ethical issues which the application of pharmacogenomics will bring, as well as the widespread arguments around these ethical issues. This article will take the clinical diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer's disease and breast cancer as the main discussed subjects, and hope to discuss the corresponding ethical criteria which are rooted in to the clinical practice. The full text is mainly divided into three parts:The first part, in the foundation of the introduction of pharmacogenomics and its clinical application, the article will elaborate the multitudinous ethical challenges which the clinical testing technology of pharmacogenomics faces currently, and further introduce the ethical problems on the clinical actual cases such as Alzheimer's disease and breast cancer.The second part, takes the clinical cases as subjects, respectively from the reformed consent, the gene privacy and the security, as well as the clinical medical decision-making three aspects, to analyze how the clinicians and ethicists respectively regard these ethical issues, simultaneously attempts from above three aspects to analyze the present benefit conflicts which have existed between the clinical practice and the modern bioethical criteria.The third part, will further discuss the current conflicts existed between the clinical practice and the bioethical criteria, and points out the widespread existed disparities of ethical problems on the type and scope of questions between the problems clinicians actually faced and the issues ethicists discussed, namely the bioethical criteria are separated from the clinical actual problems in the certain degree. These disparities and discrepancies are mainly the result that the most bioethical reasoning strips away the supposedly extraneous background and context to any particular case. Therefore, the ethical issues of concrete biotechnology can only be discussed in the particular background and context in which these technologies have been actually used, only then our discussion has the practical significance, and then we can establish the new bioethical standards.