试题详情
Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in the blanks to make the passages coherent and grammatically correct. For the blanks with a given word, fill in each blank with the proper form of the given word; for the other blanks, use one word that best fits each blank.
Imagine for a moment that your unborn child has a rare genetic disorder. Not at least vaguely familiar, such as sickle-cell anaemia or cystic fibrosis, but rather a condition (bury) deep within the medical dictionary. Adrenoleukodys trophy, maybe. Or Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.
Would you, when your child is born, want to know about it? If effective treatments were available, you probably would. But if not? If the outcome were fatal, would your interest in knowing about it depend on whether your newborn had five years of life (look) forward to, or ten? Or 30?
Today these questions are mostly hypothetical. Precisely because they are rare, such disorders are seldom noticed at birth. They manifest (显现) themselves only gradually, and often with unpredictable severity. But that may soon change. Twenty years after the first human genome (map), the price of whole-genome sequencing has fallen to a point it could, in rich countries at least, be offered routinely to newborns. Parents will then have to decide exactly how much they want to know.
Early diagnosis brings with it the possibility of early treatment. Moreover, sequencing the genomes of newborns could offer a lifetime of returns. A patient's genome may reveal drugs will work best in his or her particular case for conditions such as ADHD, depression and cancer. Combined with information about someone's way of life, it could highlight easily neglected health risks such as cancers and cardiovascular disease, leading to better preventive measures. A database of genomes, (match) to living people, would be a benefit to medical research. The fruits of that research, in turn, would make those genomes more useful to their owners as time goes on.
Such a powerful new technology create new dangers. Widespread screening for thousands of potentially harmful genes may be counterproductive: some results may worry parents unnecessarily, because some genetic variations, occasionally indicative of disease, are not strongly so. Parents may not want to unlock all the secrets that their newborn's genome might reveal. Some may indeed prefer not to know about conditions that cannot be treated. Adult-onset illnesses pose a different dilemma — a reasonable position is that it be up to the children themselves, once grown, to decide whether they want to look at their genomic information. A further concern is that data will not be kept secure, and may be leaked or otherwise misused some point in the future.
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