Introduction: Introduction to the Special Issue

Abstract

those dollars are those of citizen tax payers, should be subject to at least occasional scrutiny and stock-taking (Joyner, Paneth, and Ioannidis 2016). This Special Issue of Perspectives in Biology and Medicine is an attempt to do just that: to ask whether the massive investment of money, equipment and human scientific talent that has been poured into studying the human genome under the assumption that this enormous scientific endeavor will advance human health has been worth it thus far, and whether it is likely to bear fruit in the future The expression that best encapsulates the goal of using genomic information to alter trajectories of disease has varied from time to time in the 15 years since the completion of the Human Genome Project (HGP) in 2003. “Personalized medicine” held sway for the first few years, but that term has now been eclipsed by “precision medicine.” Whichever term is used, the underlying principle is much the same, namely, that what modern medicine most lacks is the incorpo-