ABSTRACT
For over a decade, since the completion of the Human Genome Project, the scientific community has predicted an imminent era of personalized medicine. 1 In 2008, LeRoy Hood, a well known systems biology scientist involved in the discovery and commercialization of automated gene sequencing techniques, predicted that ‘a paradigm shift in medicine will take place, replacing the current approach, which is predominantly reactive, to one that can increasingly predict and prevent cellular dysfunction and disease’ (Hood and Galas 2008). The emphasis here is on knowledge as a powerful form of intervention – eradicating a disease before it has become one. Hood and his colleagues asserted that the next 10–15 years will be characterized by ‘a predictive medicine capable of determining a probabilistic, individualized future health history.’ Personalized medicine would become ‘P4 medicine’: ‘predictive’, ‘personalized’, ‘preemptive’ and ‘participatory’ (Hood and Galas 2008).
