Has ‘precision medicine’ gone too far?

With the millennium came the mapping of the human genome and some utopian predictions that, in just a decade’s time, decoding DNA would usher in a new era of medicine. That didn’t exactly happen, and the ethos that promised it, called genetic reductionism, may be blinding scientists to the complexities and potential of biology.

As a pair of doctors write in STAT, the dogma of precision medicine — that genetics is the be-all, end-all of understanding disease — has stolen focus and funding from other ideas and blunted debate in the halls of science.

“While we are occasionally told that we are Luddites or nihilists (generally without much debate of the merits of our position),” they write, “the most frequent communications we receive have been along the lines of ‘I agree with you, but can’t speak up publicly for fear of losing my grants, alienating powerful people, or upsetting my dean.’ This atmosphere cannot be good for the culture of science.”

Read their argument here and weigh in for yourself.