interview 229.int.0 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Of course, Wright and Kroese’s guidelines sound reasonable, but the devil is in the details. How transparent is transparent? What is an ‘appropriate’ level of support? Would not a company who interprets these guidelines at a low level have – at least initially – an appreciable cost advantage? I noted with concern per the New York Times:

Navigenics said its tests are ordered by a physician because a doctor on contract to the company reviews customer orders before the specimens are passed to the testing laboratory.

(Pollack, 2008). That is, the industry’s business practice standards might be very low.

In reading over Harrisburg University’s “Ethical Decision Making” competency, my concluding concern is that my intrinsic standards are too high with the result that if I maintain these standards of integrity and honesty, I might deprive myself of income even as my society would implicitly want me to lower my standards and provide such services. As such, it seems to me that clear written and on-line explanations of the methods used to produce results would be a minimum required business practice.

As to the overall search experience, I was delighted to find quality articles in each of (i) the New York Times, (ii) on-line, and (iii) in our Library’s database. The search, per se, was much easier than I anticipated in that, for example, it more often seems that peer-reviewed scientific-oriented journal articles concern themselves with minutiae – as an example, the results of obtuse chemical reactions -- and not with the developments of emerging businesses/consumer services. On the otherhand, I was very disappointed that employees of a “public policy institute” were not available for a short interview by a student.
Works Cited

Ng, P.C., Murray, S.S., Levy, S., Venter, J.C. (2009). An agenda for personalized medicine. Nature, 461, 724 – 726.

Pollack. A. (2008, June 26). Gene Testing Questioned by Regulators. New York Times.
Retrieved http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/business/26gene.html

Wright, C.F., & Kroese, M. (2010). Evaluation of genetic tests for susceptibility to common complex diseases: why, when and how? Human Genetics, 127, 125-134.