This book was written in three institutions, each of which has an international reputation in the field of medical law. These are the universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Boston. I am extremely privileged to have worked in all of these with colleagues whose scholarship and enthusiasm for their subject has inspired me greatly in my own work. The focus of much of that work – from my undergraduate days and throughout my professional career – has been the troublesome concept of privacy. I confess to a degree of obsession about my own personal privacy, and a scholarly interest in the subject has always felt like a natural corollary to the rest of my life. But the breadth and depth of privacy analysis is overwhelming, and little headway can be made unless one's attention is focused on a relatively narrow area of debate. It is primarily for this reason that I have written this book about genetic privacy.

Advances in genetics pose some of the most intractable problems that medical lawyers and bioethicists have faced since the emergence of their disciplines only a few decades ago. These problems are often hailed as being unique and therefore deserving of special attention. I disagree that they are unique. I do believe, however, that these problems are presented in a more acute form in the realm of genetics, and accordingly this exemplar provides an excellent vehicle to examine broader matters that impact on these disciplines as a whole.