Fifty years from now, if I avoid crashing my motorcycle in the interim, I will be 106. If the advances that I envision from the genome revolution are achieved in that time span, millions of my comrades in the baby boom generation will have joined Generation C to become healthy centenarians enjoying active lives.
How do we get from here to there? For starters, we must develop technologies that can sequence an individual鈥檚 genome for $1000 or less. This will enable healthcare providers to identify the dozens of glitches that we each have in our DNA that predispose us to certain diseases. In addition, we need to unravel the complex interactions among genetic and environmental risk factors, and to determine what interventions can reduce those risks. With such information in hand, new treatments will be developed, and our 鈥渙ne-size-fits-all鈥� approach to healthcare will give way to more powerful, individualised strategies for predicting and treating diseases 鈥� and, eventually, preventing them.
The challenge doesn鈥檛 stop there. We are already setting our sights on the ultimate nemesis of Generation C: ageing. Genomic research will prove key to discovering how to reprogram the mechanisms that control the balance between the cell growth that causes cancer and the cell death that leads to ageing. It is possible that a half-century from now, the most urgent question facing our society will not be 鈥淗ow long can humans live?鈥� but 鈥淗ow long do we want to live?鈥�
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