Ethical, legal and social issues in bioinformatics applications

Abstract

Bioinformatics is the use of computing for acquisition, management, organization, storage and analysis of biological data. The introduction of various bioinformatics applications plays a leading role in the health sector in recent years. Though, the bioinformatics applications possess many advantages, each application makes some ethical, legal and social issues in the community. This study analyses applications of Bioinformatics in forensic databases with DNA fingerprinting, Biological weapons with genetic engineering, Pharmacogenomics, Personalized medicine and Detection of mutation with NGS through critically assessing available literature. The ethical, legal and social issues are arising due to the computational analysis of genetic data which reveal some personal hidden information about individuals. Because the result may reveal some ugly and bitter truth which cannot be accepted in the society sometimes. The privacy is the most concern as most of the Bioinformatics applications are dealing with genes which is specific and private to each individual. Each bioinformatics application should be proven as safe and secure as those input data and the results are considered as more sensitive and private. This study proposes some healthy practices and policies to reduce the above mentioned non-technical impacts.