Will Genetics Revolutionize Medicine?

On both sides of the Atlantic, revolutionary claims have been made about the ultimate impact of genetics on clinical medicine. John Bell at Oxford has asserted that “within the next decade genetic testing will be used widely for predictive testing in healthy people and for diagnosis and management of patients. . . The excitement in the field has shifted to the elucidation of the genetic basis of the common diseases.”1 And in the United States the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, Francis Collins, has stated that the good that would come from mapping the human genetic . . .