Me-Too Medicine.(Brief Article)

The diet drug cocktail fen-phen was supposed to be safe, but it became a nightmare for AnnMarie Mannino. After shedding more than 90 pounds in just six months, she was diagnosed in 1997 with severe damage to her heart valves. She survived, but others aren't so lucky. Each year adverse side effects of all drugs kill 100,000 people--twice the death toll from auto accidents. And right now there's not much scientists can do about it. Just because a drug is "proven" safe when tested on thousands of people, there's no telling what will happen to that one person in a million who possesses the wrong combination of genes.

The problem with medicine's one-size-fits-all approach is that it doesn't account for the subtle variations in our genes that make each one of us unique. By 2012, though, your general practitioner may be better equipped. In what's being touted as the "era of personalized medicine," newborn babies would have their genomes etched in microchips. This information would allow doctors to tailor drugs, diets and treatments to each person's particular genome, avoiding drug fatalities, zeroing in on disease-prevention strategies and helping us all lead healthier lives. "Ten years from now we are going to look back and say that what we were working with today is downright primitive," says Claire Fraser, president of the Institute for Genomic Research.

Personalized genomics will alert doctors to dozens of inherited risk factors for a wide range of diseases. By the time symptoms of diabetes have appeared, for example, the pancreas has already ...