Ethics and Empiricism in the Formation of Professional Guidelines

In this issue, an article by Clayton and colleagues (2014), for the Clinical Sequencing Exploratory Research (CSER) Consortium Pediatrics Working Group, “Addressing the Ethical Challenges in Genetic Testing and Sequencing of Children,” lays out the differences in ethical frameworks for genetic testing in children that were used by professional societies in two sets of recommendations released in 2013. The first set of recommendations was jointly issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Medical Genetics (American Academy of Pediatrics 2013; Ross et al. 2013). The second set was issued by the ACMG alone (Green et al. 2013). The authors of the article in this issue of American Journal of Bioethics include some of those who were involved in the development of both documents. […]