The Language of Life

One day, we’ll all have smart cards containing our entire genetic inventory, our family history and our likely reaction to certain medications. Armed with comprehensive knowledge of our possible fates, we’ll be better prepared for the ills that might one day assail us, and act sooner to prevent them. One day. The technology of medicine, tailored to the genes of each patient, is now moving faster than a buttered ferret up a Teflon trouser leg.

Never before have individuals had so much knowledge about their own heritage, or so much power over it. In the end, though, it’s up to us as individuals to take responsibility for our own fates. You might indeed have a gene that increases your lifetime risk of heart disease by 10 per cent – but you could reduce your risk greatly now by taking exercise, giving up smoking, eating fewer doughnuts, and learning about your family history.

So says Francis Collins, whose team led the race to sequence the human genome, and whose lab discovered genes associated with cystic fibrosis and other inherited diseases. This book is therefore a user’s guide, very much from the horse’s mouth, on how to join the ‘revolution’ in personalised medicine. Collins’s accounts of the basics of DNA and such tricky concepts as risk are dispatched with ease.

But what makes this book stand out is the wealth of personal stories of tragedy and triumph over disease, gleaned by Collins from his long experience as a physician as well as a scientist. He doesn’t shy away from the practical problems that lie ahead, notably, the enormous costs of some medical treatments, the seeming reluctance of insurers to underwrite preventive measures, and the difficulties faced by the uninsured. My only concern is that this is an unashamedly American book, which, to a British reader will give the feeling of looking in from the outside. But with the current furore over US healthcare, it is timely indeed.

Dr Henry Gee is a senior editor of the journal Nature.