Forward Thinking

The Albert Einstein College of Medicine's Harry Ostrer imagines that personalized prevention will be a standard part of healthcare by April 25, 2023. In a post at the Oxford University Press blog, Ostrer envisions the state of genomic medicine in primary care 11 years from now, saying that by 2015, patients' genomics information will have already been fully integrated into their electronic medical records. Still, he adds, "all of the ethical dilemmas of the recent past have not been solved by 2023. Debates are still raging about whether to report risk of schizophrenia and other mental illnesses and likely IQ." Eleven years from now, Ostrer predicts that "libertarians and genomicists [will] wrangle in the courts about whether states could sequence the genomes of children in their newborn screening programs."