BACK in June 2000, when Bill Clinton triumphantly announced the working draft of the human genome, it was tempting to believe that we would soon be masters of our own genetic make-up. Tempting but entirely wrong. Five years on, most of the profound possibilities stemming from the human genome project appear as far away as ever.
Take pharmacogenomics, the idea of tailoring medicines to an individual’s genetic make-up. It was always going to take time to develop: identifying which genes act to alter a drug’s impact on metabolism is a painstaking process, made still more complex and time-consuming by the…
