Not as Good as Gold: ‘Goodness’ of Genomic Data

By Barbara Dubbeldam, January 22, 2019

Is the goodness of genomic data – our individual and collective entries in ‘the book of life’ – simply a matter of accuracy and a future in which ‘precision medicine’ averts or cures all ills? In our ‘Not as Good As Gold’ chapter Bruce Baer Arnold and Wendy Bonython argue that notions of goodness are necessarily conflicted, contested, and thus require more thought. Goodness encompasses questions about dignity (something valorized by philosophers such as Aristotle, Kant, Rawls and Nussbaum) rather than promises of a glorious genomic future based on population-scale data collection.