From Comparative and Functional Genomics to Practical Decisions in the Clinic: A View from the Trenches
- Baylor College of Medicine, Texas Children's Cancer Center, Houston, Texas 77096, USA
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
During the depths of the plague which reduced the population of western Europe by over 40% during the 14th century,
“…medieval physicians attributed the onset of the disease to God's punishment for sin and to bad astrological conjunction
involving the feared planet Saturn. The king of France appointed a commission of University of Paris professors to account
for the Black Death. The professors soberly blamed the medieval catastrophe on the astrological place of Saturn in the house
of Jupiter.”
(Norman Cantor, In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World it Made)
To many participants, both Science and Medicine are about to enter a different age. The release of the first comprehensive sequences of the human genome, and the advent of microarray, proteonomic, informatic, and other technologies, either spawned directly by the science of the Genome Project or already employed to help explain the workings of the genome, have combined to form this impression. But how will all of this new information and the new techniques be implemented? Will people merely enter a phone booth apparatus, or be carried there as babies, or even perhaps as a tube of fetal cells culled from maternal blood, to have their entire medical future printed out based on the results from lab(s) on a chip? All would (I hope) agree that this represents scary and simplistic thinking, but some of the popular images and even professed expert opinions are not very far from this perception. Further questions arise: What will happen to the small percentage of patients for whom “inevitable” doom or horrible reactions to the accepted medications are predicted? Pharmaceutical companies have obvious incentives to develop pharmacogenetics to ease the early phases of drug discovery and development, but what will be the incentive to develop different medications for …
