Consider this scenario:
“In five or ten years, you will show up at your doctor’s office, not feeling well, with a thumb drive that contains all your important health-related information, including a copy of your entire genome. Your physician will run the disk through a sophisticated computer and, after studying the results, prescribe a treatment, maybe even a form of genetic engineering or gene therapy, based on the genomic components of your disease, not just your symptoms.”
Fact or Fiction?
“The full-blown version of this five-year scenario is fiction,” says David Smith, Ph.D., professor of laboratory medicine and pathology at the Mayo Clinic. “Now having your genome on a disk in five years will very likely be a reality but being able to fully interpret your genome’s data and make a clinically important decision remains more in the realm of fiction.”
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