David Dobbs in Slate: Why genetics research is both dazzling and disappointing.

The American Society for Human Genetics has just concluded its annual meeting, and as David Dobbs points out in Slate, the news is exciting:

Geneticists are sequencing and analyzing genomes ever faster and more precisely. In the last year alone, the field has quintupled the rate at which it identifies genes for rare diseases. These advances are leading to treatments and cures for obscure illnesses that doctors could do nothing about only a few years ago, as well as genetic tests that allow prospective parents to bear healthy children instead of suffering miscarriage after miscarriage.

But this isn't the whole story, as Dobbs explains in this insightful piece. Genetics has over promised what it can do for medicine for decades, most spectacularly in the case of the Human Genome Project. Genetics "stands in a bizarre but lovely state of confusion—taken aback, but eager to advance; balanced tenuously between wild ambition and a deep but troubling humility," he writes. Geneticists "with any historical memory hold a painful awareness that their field has fallen short of the glory that seemed close at hand" when the human genome sequence was announced in 2000. We now had all the blueprints, and translating that to medical interventions and treatments was supposed to be as easy and straightforward as using plans to erect a skyscraper.

It hasn't worked out that way, as Dobbs explains. Like Michelangelo's David, he writes, genetics stands poised on one foot, ready to shift forward into a future it has not yet been able to grasp.

-Paul Raeburn