The Human Genetics Commission is currently consulting on proposals to place restrictions on genetic testing.
Dr David King, of Human Genetics Alert, expressed concern about a "drift towards GM babies".
Right now, these tests provide only limited information, but the technology for understanding human genetics is advancing at a breakneck pace.
It has to be said that this preference for keeping human genetics in the public domain is not held only by governments and charities.
The research is published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.
"The Human Genetics Commission is right to ask these questions because commercial organisations get into these areas quite quickly without thinking through the implications, " Dr Prior said.
Fakhrai was born in Iran and came to the U.S. in the mid-1960s to get a doctorate in human genetics at Michigan State University, in East Lansing.
Today, regardless of whether researchers are studying particle physics or human genetics, science papers by multiple authors receive more than twice as many citations as those by individuals.
And the innovations that have come from the study of human genetics are actually starting to result in new drugs, more than a decade after the human genome project.
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Prof Donnelly, a professor of statistical science at Oxford University and director of the Wellcome Trust centre for human genetics, said DNA samples were analysed at about 500, 000 different points.
"For someone at low genetic risk, being in a bad environment conveys only a modestly increased risk of drug abuse, " says lead study author Dr. Kenneth S. Kendler, professor of psychiatry and human genetics at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.
Typically, these are motivated by a conspicuous success, a development program that was driven by the strength of beautiful molecular data, and the canonical example these days is PCSK9, a target which seems to feature an almost unprecedented alignment of human genetics, biomarker, and animal model data.
In a speech at the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics on November 6, Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health and the man who headed the Human Genome Project, implored his colleagues in genetics to work to develop new treatments for rare diseases.
This medicine is an impressive collection of firsts: not only is it the first drug approved to treat lupus, a potentially fatal disease in which the immune system attacks healthy tissues, it is also one of the first drugs to come out of genomics, the systematic evaluation of human genetics that was epitomized by the human genome project a decade ago.
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What we were interested in doing back in those early days of human molecular genetics was just trying to find out some basic information about inherited variation in our DNA. And it was purely by accident in those studies that we generated, totally out of the blue, what proved to be the very first DNA fingerprint.
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear, for a second time, a lawsuit challenging patents held by Myriad Genetics on human genes implicated in breast cancer.
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And the Human Genome Project led to advances in genetics which have put us at the beginning of a road to personalised healthcare.
Agriculture enjoys neither the profitability nor the investor interest of medicine, so the resources brought to bear on the Human Genome Project are scarce in plant genetics.
It's one of about a million artefacts being put online by the Wellcome Trust as part of an ambitious project to tell the story of genetics, from Mendel to the Human Genome Project.
The genetics revolution is being driven by the Human Genome Project, funded by government and charity, which has already sequenced and mapped two-thirds of the genome, with 10% more added each month.
"I don't think I've ever seen that level of leadership in a young person, " says Harvard genetics professor George Church, who helped start the Human Genome Project and is another of Codon's founders.
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Until the past decade or so, it had been accepted wisdom in the genetics community that only the tiniest percentage of the human genome contains the instructions that determine how we look, feel and act whether we (or our ancestral population group) are more likely to be grumpy or gregarious, impetuous or cautious, generous or a Grinch, a speedster or a marathoner, slow-witted or a math ace.
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Now an experimental drug from Iceland's DeCode Genetics shows promise of quelling heart inflammation in a preliminary human trial.
If those studying the genetics of obesity concentrate all their efforts on the genes in human cells, they might thus be looking in the wrong place.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has been awarding patents on human genes for almost 30 years, but opponents of Salt Lake City-based Myriad Genetics Inc.
Collins, at a recent genetics conference, argued that 6, 000 of the 7, 000 known human diseases are rare, and that together they affect as many as 30 million people.
According to Anthony Kerlavage of Celera, a company formed last year with the intention of sequencing the entire human genome using private money (and beating government-financed projects in the process), a genetics laboratory can easily produce 100 gigabytes of data a day that is about 20, 000 times the volume of data in the complete works of Shakespeare or J.
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