It’s nice to know you’re special. Anita Goel backs this up with science, showing that no two people are alike in their molecular profiles, and as such no two treatments can be alike. Tailored diagnostics – personalized medicine has come to our doorsteps. Covered with ivy, Dr. Goel is a product of Harvard-MIT and Stanford, a physicist, a physician, founder and CEO of Nanobiosym, a company that has a not-so-humble vision to “to revolutionize healthcare globally.” She states that their goal is to give patients worldwide real-time access to their own diagnostic information via low-cost handheld devices and provide a personalized approach to cure through one’s genetic makeup. So what, individualism is the new holism?
Perfect cure for the imperfect disease?
Remember the Human Genome project in the 1980s that embarked on mapping out our genetic makeup, just because they could? It created quite a stir as people weren’t sure how sieving through our 3 billion units of DNA at taxpayers’ expense would really help our healthcare system. Two decades later, Dr. Goel tells us that medicine, as we know it, will be a thing of the past. It’s about acknowledging that people at the “bottom of the pyramid” can now play doctor with a single drop of saliva or blood, telling a detailed story of their health status. Goodbye standardization and hello personalized healthcare. So does this mean that patients are empowered by personalizing their pathologies? Of course it’s a matter of perspective: are we trapped or not trapped in our own cells? I guess it depends on how Orwellian you are about these things.
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