Will Candidates' DNA Play a Role in Future Elections?

Moments after Barack Obama was elected, pundits began to speculate about future elections. And for once there is a new idea to add to the horse-race discussions: some commentators have proposed that we look at candidates' genomes to discover if they have the qualities we need in a president.

Personalized genome scans will almost certainly be better, cheaper and much more widely available during the next presidential election cycle. It therefore makes sense to discuss this possibility now, outside of the partisan frenzy stoked by campaigns. The Wall Street Journal, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the New York Times have all given space to the idea, and the authors have taken very different positions.

Would an inspection of candidates' DNA be helpful? Could we learn enough about their health, character and ability to justify this intrusion into their genomic privacy? Should anything be off-limits? These are valid and interesting questions with important policy implications. Considering them in the context of a hypothetical election can also teach us something useful about how and when to apply the results of genetic tests to our own everyday lives.

Some enthusiastic researchers, notably the Personal Genome Project's George Church, think we should scan the DNA of all candidates, and publish the results. Public health scholars Robert Green and George Annas, on the other hand, warn against the possibility of "genetic McCarthyism." They're concerned that DNA results would be abused as a new form of opposition research, with dire and misleading warnings being broadcast in attack ads: "Can we risk as President someone who may [perhaps, eventually] suffer from a [potentially] debilitating disease?"

Even worse is the prospect of someone being asked to "prove" their racial purity with a genetic test -- and this has already happened, in Turkey. President Abdullah Gul is considered by some in the far right to be "soft" on Armenians because he has refused to condemn calls for an apology for the 1915 ethnic cleansing, which is widely regarded as genocide. One politician has called for him to demonstrate that he is not part-Armenian: "These days, scientists use DNA tests, not family trees, to identify ethnic identity."

Such an overtly racist abuse of testing may seem far-fetched here, though there are already tests that purport to demonstrate membership in particular Native American tribes, and indeed to show Jewish ancestry. More pressing is the possibility of misleading medical prognoses, and an early defense against this prospect may be better public understanding about what genomic tests can and cannot do.

In a sense, we have always used genes, very crudely, to help us choose our elected leaders. Two pairs of fathers and sons have held the highest office, for instance, and three Kennedy brothers have run for it. There are many other examples of families with several members elected to Congressional and other offices; the Udalls include two incoming Senators as well as another cousin who just lost his seat and several distinguished ancestors. Burke's Peerage is said to have claimed that every presidential election "has been won by the candidate with the most royal genes." Certainly, there are other factors -- policy can make a difference -- but some people do look on genetic inheritance as a qualification.

However, genomics is a science of statistical possibilities. Genetic tests can almost never tell us with certainty whether someone will come down with a debilitating disease in the next four or eight years. A few medical conditions can be predicted with real confidence from genetic data, but in almost all cases the most that can be said is that there is an increased or decreased chance of hypertension or cancer or some other disease.