Pharmacogenetics and the future of medical practice.

Pharmacogenetic approaches are widely expected to bring about a "revolution" in medicine. While the application of molecular genetic approaches to disease research will provide us with new opportunities for progressively more targeted and, hopefully, more effective treatments, these developments will be evolutionary in nature and will, for their realization, still require the painstaking process that discovering and developing a new drug entails. It is also quintessential for the realization of these promises that we support a more rational understanding and more realistic expectations in the public at large through dialogue and information.