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Letter: Baby gene screening is wrong in so many ways

Published 30 July 2025

From Sam Edge, Ringwood, Hampshire, UK

I couldn’t agree more with Suzanne O’Sullivan that the half-baked UK government plan to screen all newborns for hundreds of gene variants is dangerous, a waste of money and unscientific(12 July, p 21).

As well as being pointless from a clinical point of view, as with previous plans to put babies’ fingerprints or other biometrics into a central database, it is an irreversible invasion of the privacy of people who have no possible way of giving informed consent.

Issue no. 3554 published 2 August 2025

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