"Genetics shouldn't be separated. It's part of medicine. It's part of medical records," Bombard said.
Audience member Sarah T. Evans, a Harvard Medical School student, said she appreciated the diversity of the panel but worried that clear remedies to the problem were not given.
"Everyone agreed that there is some sort of a problem," she said. "I don't think anyone offered a really good solution, but they all recognized the need for discussion and education about it."
The Harvard Health Caucus, created in 1999, is an interdisciplinary think tank created to discuss health policy.
The next discussion in the series on the Human Genome Project, to be held March 7, is entitled "The HGP, the Patient-Doctor Relationship and Translating Advances in Genomics into Better Health."
--Staff writer William M. Rasmussen can be reached at wrasmuss@fas.harvard.edu.