A quiet revolution — and a helping hand
By Rep. Michael C. Burgess, M.D.
Published: Thursday, November 17, 2011
Revolutions are usually pretty noisy affairs — arriving, as they often do, on the heels of military battles and political upheaval.
But some revolutions, much like the fog in Carl Sandburg’s epic poem, come to us — quietly, unannounced.
That might be the case for one of the most profound revolutions of our time — personalized medicine made possible by the mapping of the human genome. To be sure, the 2003 National Institutes of Health announcement that the genome-mapping project was complete came with much fanfare, quite properly so. For the first time, we could understand the working components that defined and regulated life. Read more »