Angelina Jolie's openness about her decision to undergo mastectomies because of the BRCA1 mutation can help inspire countless women to face this difficult decision. Yet several obstacles exist that deserve attention, concerning doctors and costs of testing.

I admire Angelina for taking the unselfish view that she will do whatever it takes to be sure she will be around to parent her children. And I commend Angelina for making her decision public and thereby supporting other women who face an increased cancer risk.

I hope all of us use this news as an opportunity to encourage people to learn and ask questions about their own family cancer history and raise awareness that young women can and do get breast cancer.

It's bad enough living with the specter of recurrence from one form of cancer showing back up; I don't need to have to worry about another one. So, I'm electing to have my healthy breasts amputated as a preventative measure.

The Supreme Court's decision about today's case will either extend or crimp the capacity of patients, doctors, researchers and other biotechnology firms, to use information about the human body to detect and treat other illnesses in the future.

This ongoing debate on gene patents boils down to one simple question: Should anyone, in this case Myriad Genetics, be allowed to patent human genes? For me this case is personal.

As Tom Murphy states so clearly, the decoding of a person's genome doesn't tell them how they will die, but rather how they should live. Yes, this is what we will learn from decoding our genes.

That Iranian Jews should have their own "special" diseases is not as strange as it may seem: Ours is the oldest community in the diaspora, offspring of the slaves who, in the sixth century BC, were brought into the Babylonian exile.

What if, at your fingertips, you had all the information that could tell you all you needed to know about every disease and/or illness you may contract for the rest of your life?

If the experts in traumatic brain injury think there's value in using genotyping to gauge the risks of high-impact sports for their own children, as noted by the authors in a recent research paper, it must be of value to others, too.

"I always knew I shouldn't have stayed in that job and that apartment," a social worker with breast cancer and a mutation for the disease recently tol...

Karen Kramer's children were 9, 14 and 16 when she told them she'd tested positive for a harmful BRCA gene mutation, putting her at much higher risk o...