The New York Times reports that there’s a “huge difference between sixteen and n

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The New York Times reports that there’s a “huge difference between sixteen and
nineteen years old,” when you’re talking about prospects for professional
baseball. A kid whose skills knock your socks off for a sixteen-year-old just
looks modestly good when he practices with nineteen-year-olds.Michael S.
Schmidt and Alan Schwarz, “Baseball’s Use of DNA Raises Questions,” New York
Times, July 21, 2009, accessed May 24, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/
22/sports/baseball/22dna.html?hp.
This is a significant problem in the Dominican Republic, which produces
excellent baseball players but little in the way of reliable paperwork proving
who people really are and when they were born. The Cleveland Indians learned
all about that when they gave a $575,000 bonus to a seventeen-year-old
Dominican named Jose Ozoria, only to later find out he was actually a twenty-
year-old named Wally Bryan.
This and similar cases of misidentification explain why baseball teams are
starting to apply genetic tests to the prospects they’re scouting. Typically, the
player is invited to provide a DNA sample from himself and his parents to
confirm that he’s no older than he claims. The player pays for the test and is
reimbursed if the results show he was telling the truth.
Questions
1. Many experts in genetics consider testing an unethical violation
of personal privacy.
◦ What does it mean to “violate personal privacy”?
◦ Can a utilitarian argument (the greatest good for the greatest
number should be sought) in favor of DNA testing in the
Dominican Republic be mounted? What could it look like?
2. In the baseball world, other tests that clearly are allowed as part of the
hiring process include testing a player’s strength and speed. Is there
anything in the fair application of these tests that may ethically
allow—even require—that baseball teams extract DNA to confirm the
age?
3. Assume you accept that testing a prospect’s age is a bona fide
occupational qualification (after all, the job is to be a prospect: a
developing player, not an adult one). Once you accept that, how
do you draw the line? Couldn’t teams be tempted to use DNA
facts for other purposes? The Times article interviews a coach
who puts it this way:
I know [the baseball teams taking the DNA samples] are looking
into trying to figure out susceptibility to injuries, things like
that. If they come up with a test that shows someone’s
connective tissue is at a high risk of not holding up, can that be
used? I don’t know.Michael S. Schmidt and Alan Schwarz,
“Baseball’s Use of DNA Raises Questions,” New York Times, July 21,
2009, accessed May 24, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/
22/sports/baseball/22dna.html?hp.
Can you formulate an ethical argument in favor of teams secretly
using DNA tests to do just that, check for as many yellow and red
flags as possible in the young prospect’s genetic code?
4. Baseball scouting—the job of hiring excellent future players and
screening out mediocre ones—is very competitive. Those who do it well
are paid well; those who don’t are cycled out quickly to make room for
someone else. You have the job, you have the DNA sample. What do you
do? Why?
5. You decide to do the test in question four. The problem is people
aren’t trees; you can’t age them just by counting genetic
rings—you also need to do some cross-testing with the parents’
DNA. You do that and run into a surprise: it turns out that the
young prospect’s father who’s so proud of his athletic son isn’t
the biological dad. Now what?
◦ Is there an argument here against DNA testing, period? What
is it?
◦ Remember, the family paid for the test. Do you have a
responsibility to give them these results? Explain.
6. Lou Gehrig was the first athlete ever to appear on a box of Wheaties.
From 1925 to 1939 he played for the Yankees in every game: 2,130
straight appearances, a record that lasted more than fifty years. He was
voted into the baseball Hall of Fame in 1939. He died in 1941 from a
genetic disorder—yes, Lou Gehrig’s disease—that today’s DNA tests
would identify. Is there an ethical argument here against DNA testing of
prospects or one in favor? Or is the argument about this more
theoretical—should the rules be decided regardless of what has actually
happened at some time or place? Explain.
7. In a different sport, the sprinter Caster Semenya won the world eight-
hundred-meter challenge in 2009 with a time that few men could equal.
She looked, in fact, vaguely like a man, which led the International
Athletics Federation to run a genetic gender test. She is, it turns out,
neither a woman nor a man; she’s a hermaphrodite: a little bit of both.
Does the fact that genetic tests don’t always return clean, black-and-
white results make their use less advisable from an ethical perspective?

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