What we’re learning about the genome is going to give us
a whole new set of therapeutic interventions
that are going to be much more targeted to the problem at the molecular level.
It’ll give us a chance to practice medicine in a preventive mode,
instead of focusing our efforts on people who’ve already gotten sick.
And it won’t just be in this area of predicting future illness,
if you do fall ill you’re likely to have your DNA checked in some instances
before you get the medicine that’s going to help you,
so that it’s the right drug for you, at the right dose.
Because sequencing technology is improving all the time,
we're potentially reaching a point where genetic testing can move
out of a traditional laboratory, and into new areas,
say, for example, a pharmacy.
When people nowadays are talking about developing gene tests
that will predict all sorts of other things,
which are not in general thought of as really inherited diseases
although they’ve got a genetic background,
it’s going to be very hard indeed to explain to the average person
who isn’t deeply immersed in the statistics of this stuff
exactly how meaningful and useful those bits of information are
in terms of planning their lives.
The Government got rather excited about the idea,
with the Human Genome Project we could sequence everybody.
And the question is whether it was a good idea and what the social consequences would be.
There is something important that we need to do in society,
which is to make sure that our increasing knowledge
about people’s individual personal genetic information
is not used to unfairly discriminate against them.
I think people are right to be concerned about genetic discrimination
in either insurance, employment, or education.
At the moment in the United Kingdom we have a voluntary moratorium for insurance,
where insurance companies have actually agreed with the government
not to discriminate against people who've had predictive genetic tests.
You can develop a DNA profile which is very substantially individual-specific,
and this is now the standard technology
both in individual identification in forensic investigations,
and also in establishing family relationships,
for example in paternity disputes, and immigration disputes
where there’s doubts about whether the family’s genuine or not.
Every single DNA test, has behind it, a human drama.
Your profile goes on the database because you’ve committed an offence,
but can now be used not only to catch you again if you re-offend,
but also to inculpate any relative that may offend in the future.
And I think there’s a host of ethical and moral issues surrounding that
that simply have not been debated.
This is going to be the century of biological research,
we are going to learn how life works at a level of detail that people could not have imagined.
So if you ask me what I’m most excited about,
and I’m not sure it’s five years away, it might be more like ten or fifteen,
it’s a new class of treatments, a new class of behavioural interventions,
that no-one will even call genetic.
It’ll just be based on “We know that’s how diabetes works, and so we learned how to fix it”.
Will the seed of that knowledge have come from genetics? I believe it will.
But will it actually look genetic when it comes to the clinic?
I’m not sure it will. It’ll just be someone who lives longer, a healthier life,
because of something they did that they don’t know traced to genetics.
To me that would be the biggest success.