Patient Zero and the Dawn of Genomic Medicine

We hear it in all the loose talk about health care.  About the wonders of medicine, about how we are living longer and about the advances of our doctors.  The fact is we are mostly still in the dark ages. The standard treatment for cancer today, poisoning the body, is a little like how we once viewed leaching.

As for diagnostics, a huge percentage of today's sickest patient go through a multi year odyssey, just to discover what’s wrong with them… and that’s if they are at a world class medical facility.

But all of this is changing.  We are on the cusp of the brave new world of genomic medicine.  A time when treatment will be personalized, when the brutality of some treatments will be vastly refined and when medicine really will be worthy of the 21st Century and all the highfalutin rhetoric we hear 

Nowhere is this more clear than in the story that Pulitzer Prize winning journalists Mark Johnson and Kathleen Gallagher tell in One in a Billion: The Story of Nic Volker and the Dawn of Genomic Medicine.

My conversation with Mark Johnson & Kathleen Gallagher: