THE FUTURE OF MEDICINE

Sir,

Thirty per cent of children are genetic offspring of someone other than the guy who thinks he is the father. That statistic must strike terror into every father reading this. Now that I have your attention, you’ll be happy to know that the aforementioned number is wildly inaccurate. The true ratio of misappropriated paternity is three per cent at most. I imagine the statistic of 30 per cent is the invention of fathers’ rights groups, which have been known to have an agenda against women. Male activists from such groups spew obscenities such as ‘paternity fraud is worse than rape’. So, you can’t really put anything past these gents.

Congregation

Three per cent is still a large number if you consider that we have seven and a half billion people on this green earth. That’s about 105 million fathers who are kidding themselves if, for instance, the size of the congregation at your church is over 5 000 people. With the help of quick mental Mathematics, we can deduce that about 75 people are expending resources on another man’s offspring. That is not a bad thing per se. I mean, it takes a village right? It is, however, an ethical issue. Genetic profiling and genetic sequencing do not exist solely to bust promiscuous mothers. DNA samples recovered by forensic investigators at crime scenes are processed using DNA testing techniques.

Investigations

During successful investigations, perpetrators can be identified with high accuracy. That’s at least two things genetic tests are good for – we can use them to solve murder mysteries and answer the question ‘who’s your daddy’ with unparalleled accuracy. A woman aged 37 was diagnosed with breast cancer and treated with surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. After two years, the same woman was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and treated again with chemotherapy and surgery and she returned a third time with more ovarian cancer, more chemotherapy, and six months after that she was diagnosed with Leukaemia at 42. She went into respiratory failure and died eight days later. This is not hypothetical.

Harvesting

There is a point if you keep reading. A Dr Richard Wilson decided to take a look at this woman’s post-mortem. He sequenced the woman’s whole genome by harvesting her skin cells and bone marrow. He discovered that the woman had a certain gene mutation that, if you should have it, makes it 90 per cent likely that you will have cancer at some point in your life. Whole genome sequencing can inform on a person’s biological weaknesses and predict what sort of disease they are likely to have in the future so that corrective measures can be adopted early. This sort of personalised treatment is believed to be the future of medicine. It has the potential to extend our life expectancy significantly… if you should afford it.

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