Professor Sonia M. Suter

The New York Times article Congress Near Deal on Genetic Test Bias Bill said

Congress reached an agreement clearing the way for a bill to prohibit discrimination by employers and health insurers on the basis of genetic tests.
 
Proponents say the new law, more than a dozen years in the making, would help usher in an age of genetic medicine, in which DNA tests might help predict if a person is at risk of a disease, allowing action to be taken to prevent it.
 
“You don’t want to be denied health insurance when you are at risk for breast cancer,” said Sonia M. Suter, an associate professor at George Washington University Law School. “But it seems to me you really don’t want to be denied health insurance when you have breast cancer.”

Sonia M. Suter, M.S., J.D. is Associate Professor of Law George Washington University.
 
Sonia joined the Law School faculty in 1999 after holding a Greenwall Fellowship in bioethics and health policy at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins Universities. While in law school, she was executive articles editor of the Michigan Law Review and was awarded the Henry M. Bates Memorial Scholarship, the highest law school award. She then clerked for Judge John M. Walker, Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
 
Prior to attending law school, she earned a master’s degree and achieved Ph.D. candidacy in human genetics. She then worked as a genetic counselor for two years. She has taught torts, genetics and the law, and bioethics and the law at the University of Michigan Law School. Her scholarship focuses on legal issues in medicine and genetics as well as bioethics.
 
Sonia authored The Allure and Peril of Genetic Exceptionalism: Do We Need Special Genetics Legislation?, The Routinization of Prenatal Testing, Whose Genes Are These Anyway?: Familial Conflicts over Access to Genetic Information, Value neutrality and nondirectiveness: Comments on future directions in genetic counseling, and A Brave New World of Designer Babies? and coauthored Public stem cell banks: considerations of justice in stem cell research and therapy, Safety issues in cell-based intervention trials, and Isolation and characterization of the rat plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 gene. Read the full list of her publications!
 
Sonia earned her B.A. at Michigan State University and both her M.S. in Human Genetics and her J.D. at the University of Michigan.
 
Read Using kin’s DNA to track suspects: Tool embraced by prosecutors raises privacy issues for others as genetic databases multiply.