When President Bill Clinton announced in 2000 that Craig Venter and Dr. Francis Collins of the National Human Genome Research Institute had succeeded in mapping the human genome, he solemnly declared that the discovery would "revolutionize" the treatment of virtually all human diseases.
The expectation was that this single reference map of the 3 billion base pairs of DNA — the human genetic code — would quickly unlock the secrets of Alzheimer's, diabetes, cancer and other scourges of human health.
As it turns out, Clinton's forecast was not unlike President George W. Bush's "mission accomplished" speech in the early days of the Iraq war, said Dr. Eric Topol, director of Scripps Translational Science Institute, which was hosting the Future of Genomic Medicine symposium in La Jolla on Thursday and Friday.