Without an adequate ethical infrastructure, the road to personalized medicine will be rocky at best.

Discovering the genetic variations that create profiles of risk and drive individual responses to drugs and vaccines has proven more difficult than many initially presupposed. Rhetoric about the prospect of personalized medicine has exceeded the ability to deliver on that vision. There also remain significant ethical and policy obstacles that may hinder the arrival of personalized medicine. The emergence of new prenatal genetic tests make the resolution of these ethical challenges imperative.