Emerging technologies from the Human Genome Project for understanding susceptibility and risk

The new technologies from the Human Genome Program provide exceptional opportunities for surveying and measuring human exposure, as well as determining susceptibility on an individual-by-individual basis. These new technologies will soon enable rapid screening of populations at risk, as well as the broader public, for a variety of genes known to be associated with increased risk. These include specific oncogenes, tumor suppressor genes and DNA repair enzymes. Use of these technologies also presents a number of ethical issues, both in screening and in use of the information about individuals. Overall, the use of rapid genotyping technologies will introduce a specificity and possible group identifiers that will present new challenges to the determination of risk within the EPA mandate.