Ingenious medicine

摘要

The genome project's original goal—and its primary goal even today—is to improve human health. These days the talk is of perfect diagnosis, drugs that work first time and have no side-effects, even of predictive medicine so accurate that it could tell you, should you want to know, when you are going to die and of what. But the medical hype that surrounds it now is very different from the modest goals of the public project's originators in the late 1980s. They thought it might help people suffering from simple "Mendelian" diseases such as sickle-cell anaemia and cystic fibrosis (so called because they are caused by the breakdown of a single gene, and thus follow the rules of inheritance laid down for pea plants by Gregor Mendel).