The Justice

Media Credit: Rishika Assomull

Whether we realize it or not, medicine has touched all of our lives in many ways. We have come a long way since the days of driving out spirits and amputating without anesthesia, and yet for all our progress, we still have no real cure for cancer, diabetes or the common cold. But now, breakthroughs in genome sequencing promise to revolutionize health care and open the door to personalized medicine.

Lord Turnberg of the Royal College of Physicians, England's oldest medical institution, has stated that "medicine will change more in the next twenty years than in the past two thousand." Now that 2010 is here, it is natural to wonder what changes the next decade will bring to the medical field. According to the Institute for Systems Biology, a nonprofit research organization, medicine will become much more "predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory"-what are known collectively as the "four Ps." Modern medical practice is still largely based on a "one-size-fits-all" approach, and patients have little say concerning their treatment. The process is reactionary: We wait until a person is sick before we try to help. But this may soon change with the advent of fast and affordable full-genome sequencing.

An organism's genome is its hereditary information. DNA, the "molecule of life" carries the necessary instructions to create another organism, turning an embryo into a healthy-or not-so-healthy-adult. Normally, unless it is replicating, its DNA is tightly wound and coiled. This allows more information to fit inside a given space, just as when you crumple up a newspaper. Yet despite the vast amount of information stored in our DNA, scientists have labeled up to 95 percent of it as "junk." The problem is figuring out which parts are important and how they are related to disease. In order to do that, however, we must first crack the code in a process known as DNA sequencing.

The Human Genome Project began in 1990 as an extremely ambitious international effort to map the genome of the human species. Spearheaded initially by James D. Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, the project was funded by the U.S. government's National Institutes of Health as well as other organizations worldwide. It involved major collaboration between several major countries. At the start of the project, Congress had set a timeline of 15 years for its completion. Yet by 1991, less than 0.1 percent had been finished, and had it continued at this rate it would have taken centuries to sequence the full genome. The project, however, was right on track, and by 2003 it was complete. The total cost was almost $3 billion, but as stated by the National Human Genome Research Institute, the project "will likely pay for itself many times over on an economic basis." The whole sequence was immediately made available to the public. It can be accessed by anyone with an Internet connection.

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