In October 2005, IBM Chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano announced a new company policy preventing the use of genetic information in making personnel decisions.
According to an article in Business Week:
IBM's move is as much about smart business as it is about fair employment practices. Big Blue is a big player in medical-information technology, offering a variety of computing technologies for medical and pharmaceutical research.
Among them: its powerful Blue Gene supercomputing system.
IBM knows that if people think medical information will be used against them, they may re- sist getting the tests its clients are generating. And that could hamper growth of a key market. "This is going to be extraordinarily valuable to medicine," says Caroline Kovac, general manager of IBM health care and life sciences. "But it can't happen if patients don't have a high degree of confidence in the privacy of that information."
Evidently IBM's policy was the result of input from patient and other advocacy groups- and from its own employees, thousands of whom were participating in a multi-year re- search initiative run by National Geographic. This Genographic Project will generate a massive DNA database, making it possible for scientists to map how humans populated the earth.
The employees who had volunteered DNA samples to the Project had ex- pressed some concern to the firm's HR managers over how their data would be used.
Find out if any other companies have followed IBM's lead.