ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the history of research on pharmacological individuality since the beginnings of pharmacogenetics in the 1950s. The science of pharmacogenetics was established in the 1950s through the work of Werner Kalow, Arno Motulsky, and Friedrich Vogel. At its foundation, pharmacogenetics was primarily associated with concerns about drug safety. In the 1980s a number of notable pharmaceutical-biotechnology collaborations led to new drugs such as that between Eli Lilly and Genentech to bring Humulin to market in 1982. In the same decade, scientists also began to make the case that sequencing the human genome would also serve to accelerate biomedical research and provide tools to elucidate the mechanisms and causes of human disease. Proponents of the Human Genome Project claimed it would bring about a profound transformation in drug development and the practice of medicine. Geneticist Walter Bodmer and journalist Robin McKie anticipated that the Human Genome Project will become the mainstay of the pharmaceutical industry in the next century.
