Framing utility: Regulatory reform and genetic tests in the USA, 1989–2000

Before about 1990, insofar as diagnostic and other medical tests were subject to regulatory oversight, it was chiefly to ensure that they met appropriate standards of analytic and clinical validity. Over the course of the 1990s, however, regulatory reformers in the United States began to argue that genetic tests, specifically, should also be assessed to determine whether or not they actually benefit those undergoing testing—whether they possess “clinical utility”, as they put it. The present paper asks why this shift in regulatory focus occurred specifically in relation to genetic tests, and why clinical utility became a key object of assessment. It answers these questions by situating concerns about genetic tests in the longer history of medical genetics. Looking back to the 1970s and medical geneticists' efforts to distance themselves from their earlier association with eugenics, it shows that they adopted a particular framing of the dangers of genetic testing which would inform their response to the proliferation of new genetic tests and the growth of commercial testing in the 1990s. In a series of policy committees convened over the course of that decade, medical geneticists called for regulatory measures to be implemented to ensure that genetic tests were only introduced into medical practice if they had been shown to be beneficial to those tested. The paper follows the deliberations of those committees to show in detail how geneticists worked within this framing to accommodate new technical capacities and regulatory opportunities. In the course of these deliberations, they adopted the idea of clinical utility to signify the need for evidence of benefit specifically to those tested. The paper concludes with some observations regarding how this framing of genetic tests relates to current understandings of “genetic exceptionalism” and to more recent articulations of clinical utility.