The Near Future?

Personalized medicine is nearly here, writes Greg Lucier, the chairman and chief executive officer of Life Technologies, in the Vancouver Sun. "Sooner rather than later, genomic sequencing will become the norm for patient care," he says. Lucier then envisions what a future visit to the doctor's office will entail: the patient is sequenced, the doctor can look up that data and the mutations it contains and prescribe a certain therapy, then the patient is re-sequenced and the doctor can adjust the treatment to account for new mutation information. "We see a future where DNA sequencing will be as commonplace as a stethoscope is today. Personalized medicine will provide hope where there was none and at the end of the day, will make life even better," he says.