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“Father of Pharmacogenomics” Cautiously Optimistic About the Future of Genetics
Dr. Arno Motulsky, who is now 87, essentially launched the field of pharmacogenomics, which studies how an individual’s genetic makeup affects his or her response to medication, in 1957. On Tuesday, the New York Times Science section featured an interview with Dr. Motulsky, whose life story is incredibly moving—he made his way from Nazi Germany to internment camps in France and finally to the US, eventually to become known as “the father of pharmacogenomics.”
When asked whether health insurance would pay for genetic testing and custom pharmaceuticals, Dr. Motulsky had this to say:
That’s a problem. On the hopeful side, people say it may soon be possible to sequence a person’s genome for $1,000. Once they figure out low-cost ways to sequence the genome, the price of personalized medicine will come down.
Still, one shouldn’t be misled. What we know about the genome today is not enough for all the miracles many expect from this field. There’s a lot about what regulates the genes and how they interact that we still need to understand. We won’t have the answers by tomorrow.
This hopeful but cautionary attitude seems to be widespread among genetics experts. For example, it is reflected in comments made by Nancy B. Spinner and Barbara Bernhardt in interviews with Science Progress.
Dr. Motulsky remains very active and is currently working on a project related to human color-blindness, which he thinks has useful implications for the study of higher brain functions: “It’s exciting to learn that because of heredity, different people can see the same thing differently. I think this may prove useful in studying more complex brain functions. If this were 20 years ago, I’d focus on neurogenetics. What’s going on in the brain, that’s the last frontier.”
Any eager young minds out there looking for a cutting-edge Ph.D. project?
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