Getting Ready for Gene-Based Medicine

Abstract

Despite much journalistic hyperbole, the publication last year of nearly complete sequences of the human genome^1,2 did not mean that the practice of medicine would be abruptly and radically transformed. Medicine has not been a gene-free art form in living memory — a knowledge of genetics has had an increasingly important role in medicine for over a century. Nor will it soon, if ever, become an impersonal, information-based science enabling every person to know from birth the ailments he or she will have and the perfect way to treat them.