Abstract

The promise of personalized medicine and the quest for a greater understanding of the genetic basis of disease has transformed the research enterprise. The Director of the National Institutes of Health, Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D., recently predicted “that comprehensive, genomics- based health care will become the norm, with individualized preventive medicine and early detection of illnesses.” This excitement about the potential scientific and clinical advances that may come from genomics- based research has led several NIH institutions to launch initiatives for genome-wide association studies, calling on researchers and institutions to utilize the new DNA analysis technologies to study the genetic variation between individuals with a particular illness and healthy controls.