At The Best Schools, Heather Zeiger offers a thought-provoking piece about genetics education at the university level:
Overall, training scientists to be critical thinkers—to analyze and assess ideas—is good. It promotes a greater understanding of context, and how a particular scientific topic relates to other fields of study. Furthermore, it is all too easy to compartmentalize specific areas of study, such as studying the steps of meiosis, without ever taking a critical view of a topic in the context of genetics (or any field) as a whole.
More. Like, what should we do when someone says, “I want to know whether this kid is a boy or a girl because, I don’t want any girls in my family.”
No guff. Medical scientists are facing this now. So far as we know, some are standing their ground, where legal: They will not knowingly give out information about an unborn child that is not a medical condition. Yet there is strong opposition from some quarters.
And in some such countries, perhaps, criminal charges may follow from following the physician’s Hippocratic oath (First, do no harm.) But we hope not.