A Play About Medical Ethics, Ripped From the Headlines

Is it ethical to decipher someone’s genome and unearth their past, without their permission? That’s the question posed by playwright Deborah Zoe Laufer’s new Off Broadway play, Informed Consent. The play takes as its inspiration a real court case, in which the Native American Havasupai tribe sued researchers from Arizona State University after those researchers conducted unauthorized studies using Havasupai blood samples. Laufer joins Ira to talk about the murky line between science and faith, and whether or not we really want to know everything our genes might be able to tell us.