http://bigthink.com/videos/alec-ross-on-genomics-as-the-next-trillion-dollar-industry
Modern medicine is pretty fantastic, right? Wrong. Wow, you walked right into that honey trap. Pharmaceuticals are incredibly impressive and most of us wouldn’t be alive without them, but this industry is set to skyrocket in innovation over the next few decades, making our current practices seem as primitive as the 130-pound mobile phone that seemed really futuristic in ’90s.
How ‘digitizing you and me’ could revolutionize medicine. At least in theory
There’s a whole lot of hype around precision medicine.
Proponents — up to and including President Barack Obama — predict a revolution that will bring us medical treatments as precisely tailored as a bespoke suit: Drug doses adjusted to your genome. Chemotherapy customized to your tumor’s DNA. Diets adapted perfectly to your risk for diabetes.
To propel research, Obama has proposed spending a $215 million on a Precision Medicine Initiative. The first step: Rally 1 million volunteers (or even more) to give up a slew of intimate details about their health, medical history, diet, lifestyle, genetics — and even the granular details of the bacteria that line their guts.
HENRY KOTULA 