Bioethics and the commodification of biotechnology

Although recent advances in biotechnology have brought with them a raft of ethical issues, other ethical challenges are arising not from new technologies, but rather from the expansion of biotechnology into "commodified" mass consumer applications, non-medical applications with no "purpose" other than entertainment or the satisfaction of consumer demand. In other words, commodity products targeted at a market that biotechnology does not currently exploit--the mass consumer market. This article will discuss two such examples of commodified biotechnology, the use of DNA sequence comparisons to construct genealogies; and the use of such comparisons to derive "ethnic" identities, and will conclude with a discussion of the possible consequences of such applications.