Healthy Children 2000 Book

This isn't a book I'd usually pick up. Written by the director of the Human Genome Project, it's all about genetics and how recent revolutions in that field will affect the future of personalized medicine. That said, it's very well-written. Dr. Collins writes for a lay audience, presenting enough basic genetics for the reader to understand his points (sometimes accompanied by helpful illustrations) but yet not enough to make the content overwhelming.

Each section touches on some aspect of genetics, highlighted by case studies. Discussions start with conditions where a single "misspelled" letter in the genome causes disease (like cystic fibrosis) or much higher susceptibility to disease (like the BRCA1/2 variant yielding much higher risk for breast and ovarian cancer). But they broaden out to conditions where multiple genes are at work (to greater or lesser extent), how genes might interact with environmental conditions, what role your genes might have in personality traits or aging, and a number of other highly interesting topics. Collins mentions that some companies are already offering to sequence your entire genome for you and analyze the findings, and then discusses whether people would actually want to know their own risk factors. (The answer, like so many things, is: "It depends.") At the end of each chapter is a short list of practical action steps you can take now, with the resources currently available.

Collins ends with a section on the potential future of genetics and personalized medicine. I expect that just about everything he talks about beyond the next 5-10 years is going to prove to be wrong, just because the field is moving so fast. Collins himself admits that advances in the last 2-3 years would have seemed far-fetched as little as seven or eight years ago. I don't expect that pace to slow down any time soon. And I look forward to seeing some of that progress actually trickle down to the level of individualized care for the average person.