A working model of your body, grounded in your own genome, refreshed continually with measurements from your body’s insides. This information will be collated with readings from millions of other monitored bodies. Software will produce detailed guidance about diet, supplements, exercise, medication, or treatment—guidance based not on the current practice of lumping symptoms together into broad categories of disorders, but on a precise reading of your own body’s peculiarities and its status in real time.

“And at that point you now have, for the first time in history, a scientific basis for medicine.”

turning medicine from craft into science.
2019-02-01:

However, nearly 20 years after the first predictions of dramatic success, we find no impact of the human genome project on the population’s life expectancy or any other public health measure, notwithstanding the vast resources that have been directed at genomics. Exaggerated expectations of how large an impact on disease would be found for genes have been paralleled by unrealistic timelines for success, yet the promotion of precision medicine continues unabated.

The authors of this new paper end by saying that “it is urgent that the biomedical research community reconsider its ongoing obsession with the human genome“, which is strong language. We’ve learned a lot from genomic studies, and we’re still learning more, and it’s not going away. But if by “obsession” they mean trying to apply genomic viewpoints to every problem regardless of suitability, or promising success in some of these programs once we can do just a bit more sequencing – because that’s all they’re lacking – then they have a point. The genome is great, the genome is huge, the genome is important. But it’s not the only great huge important thing out there.

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