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Newborn screening: A spot of trouble

Nature volume 475, pages 156–158 (2011)Cite this article

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A Correction to this article was published on 27 July 2011

By raising hell about newborn blood-spot screening, Twila Brase could jeopardize public-health programmes and derail research. The problem is, she has a point.

Twila Brase was not always the kind of person who hands out politically charged propaganda in airports. On a first meeting at her modest office in a shopping plaza in St Paul, Minnesota, she seems more like the unassuming nurse she was back in 1995 — before she began her second life as a bioethical gadfly, and before she had started making YouTube videos that accuse her state of commandeering the DNA of children as "government property" through widespread newborn screening programmes. Her voice is quiet and level. It is difficult to write her off as a conspiracy theorist: she simply doesn't sound like one, even when, 4.5 minutes into making the case against screening, she suggests that "some researchers" might be trying to convince the state to test day-old infants for genes linked to "a tendency towards violence".

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  1. Mary Carmichael
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See Editorial p.265

Mary Carmichael is a freelance writer in Boston, Massachusetts.

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The Genome at Ten

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Citizens' Council for Health Freedom

Minnesota Department of Public Health information on newborn screening

US Department of Health and Human Services statement on newborn screening (PDF)

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Carmichael, M. Newborn screening: A spot of trouble. Nature 475, 156–158 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/475156a

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