Ethics of Precision Medicine and Cardiothoracic Surgery

The field of cardiothoracic surgery has been at the forefront of advances in precision medicine over the past 2 decades. However, there remain ethical challenges to precision medicine in practice, where clinicians struggle to distill new discoveries to a minority of patients who may benefit. The majority of research done on molecular and genetic characterization of disease processes has been in white and male patients, causing racial and gender disparities to persist. An ethical implementation of precision medicine requires an understanding of these challenges and a willingness to engage patients as stakeholders with clinicians and scientists in precision medicine advances.