From the NY Times:

Ten years after President Bill Clinton announced that the first draft of the human genome was complete, medicine has yet to see any large part of the promised benefits.

For biologists, the genome has yielded one insightful surprise after another. But the primary goal of the $3 billion Human Genome Project — to ferret out the genetic roots of common diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s and then generate treatments — remains largely elusive. Indeed, after 10 years of effort, geneticists are almost back to square one in knowing where to look for the roots of common disease.

One sign of the genome’s limited use for medicine so far was a recent test of genetic predictions for heart disease. A medical team led by Nina P. Paynter of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston collected 101 genetic variants that had been statistically linked to heart disease in various genome-scanning studies. But the variants turned out to have no value in forecasting disease among 19,000 women who had been followed for 12 years.

The old-fashioned method of taking a family history was a better guide, Dr. Paynter reported this February in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

Statistical linkage is the problem. What, in fact, can medicine say for certain other than that you are alive or dead? And even there the decision is not always clear cut. So X is correlated with Y and Y is correlated with Z and on and on. Where does this analysis get us? Not far.

Once again, we have known the molecular defect or point mutation in the genome that results in sickle cell anemia. We have known it for 53 years and have not been able to do much about it. Now the NY Times gives us permission to note that progress in treating uncommon and common diseases through our knowledge of the genome, has been miniscule.

Ten more years of research, this time on RNA?