Key ethical issues under current debate include the need for new approaches to informed consent for large-scale genetic studies and consideration of the legal issues relating to confidentiality and use of genetic data. For example, under what circumstances (if any) might it be useful or appropriate to use genetic data in a court case to support an argument about responsibility for a behavior? Should insurance companies or employers have access to genetic data that inform risk of mental illness? How can we prevent genetic results being used to reify racist, sexist, or other stigmatizing biases? Quite apart from these potential non-medical uses of genetic data, there is the important question of whether and when genetic tests may be useful clinically – to help in confirming diagnosis; to direct management in a patient with signs of illness; or to predict risk in a person without signs of illness. At present risk variants have not been robustly established that would provide clinically useful individual predictive power and it may well be many years in the future before this is possible. Nonetheless we
