The genetic privacy of presidential candidates.

In this year's election, Senator John McCain, who had released extensive medical records in 1999, released an additional 1100 pages of records but gave reporters only a few hours to review them. President-Elect Barack Obama released an undated one-page "medical summary" to the press. News organizations pressed for more details, in the belief that the public has a right to know about a candidate's risk of future disease as an important indication of fitness for office. Although the presence of a disease or health condition is the most salient factor in the prediction of future health, medicine's ability to define levels of risk for individuals is expanding to include family history (a proxy for genetic predispositions to many diseases) and genetic markers. Family history was used by the McCain campaign, which highlighted the energy and mental sharpness of McCain's 95-year-old mother, in an attempt to counter the notion that McCain's age might be associated with diminished vigor or cognitive function. Little was said about the death of his father and grandfather of heart attacks at 70 and 61 years of age, respectively. By the same token, the Obama campaign remained silent about the death of Obama's grandfather from prostate cancer, which indicates that Obama's own risk is higher than average. During future campaigns, presidential candidates could release information about parts of their own genomes in order to highlight what might be considered a favorable ethnic background or, if they have already had a disease such as cancer, to highlight the absence of genes that confer a risk of recurrence. But in a climate of negative personal and political messages, it is more likely