Absolutely. I think it's hard to overstate what's happening. It's a real revolution in medicine. It is something that we had hoped and anticipated would happen when all of the three billion letters in the human genomic code were put together in a draft sequence in 2000 and then finalized in 2003. We are now seeing that promise.
Genetics will become a core component of all of medicine, so that when you go to your family doctor and you're found to have hypertension, your family doctor will have a point-of-care tool that allows him or her to decide which of the dozen or so anti-hypertensive medications you are most likely to respond to, in addition to advising you to lose weight and exercise—all of those things. It will literally become part of every branch of medicine. It's what we call “pharmacogenomics”: using the variants in our genome to decide how to target medications to that person. We will no longer be taking the one-size-fits-all approach for medications, which is that if you're a male you start with this medication and then work through a series of them. We'll be able to go to medication number five right away because that's what works for you.
It really is hard to overstate how it's going to change things. We're just starting to see this infiltration of genomics into the rest of medicine. In my world of relatively rare genetic conditions, we've been using genetic tests for a couple of decades, but now we're starting to see this infiltrating into the rest of medicine, which is what we wanted, but that's why the timing is so critical. We can't afford to wait, because patients need to be able to make decisions on the basis of medicine and evidence and set aside the fear of discrimination by their employer or their insurance company.