Microarrays yield more and more information: but do we want it?
10th Nov 2005, 05:04 GMT
Say you have advanced-stage ovarian cancer. You go through a grueling regime of surgery and chemotherapy, and you beat it back. You're in remission. You visit your doctor, who tells you that with one test, you can find out whether or not you'll have a relapse. Do you take it? Or would you rather just hope for the best? What if the course of treatment were the same either way? As we find out more about what genes are turned on and off in disease,microarrays, which use technology borrowed from Silicon Valley to look at thousands of genes at once to see if they're on or off, are looking more and more promising as diagnostic tools. They're mostly experimental, but expect to see more of them be FDA-approved in the years to come. With them will come more certainty than either patients or doctors are accustomed to. Then again, the same could have been said in the 16th century, before the invention of the microscope. Read Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
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