This is an interesting piece in the Economist about the upcoming personalized medicine revolution. Some people are skeptical that medicine really will be personalized, so Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School has come up with a term that means “customization”, perhaps sort of like how Dell or other retail outlets might customize products. He calls it “precision medicine”.
Of course, there are also incredibly forward-looking people working directly in the industry that see how much promise and information power is available. For instance, George Church (also at Harvard), who worked on the original Human Genome Project and now advises several genomics firms, argues that at some point “genome sequencing “will in effect be available free” because companies will give away sequencing to sell other services, such as genetic interpretation—much as mobile operators “give away” handsets to get customers to sign up for lucrative service plans. And when this happens, he reckons, “it will be just like the internet: once all this information is floating around, a lot of creative people with PCs will nose around and develop applications.”
I can’t wait.