My employer (Vanderbilt University Medical Center) is the world's leader in implementing the ideas around personalized medicine, so I picked up this audiobook to educate me on what's going on around me while I drove to and from work. In it, I found interesting stories from patients combined with weighty data from the human genome.

Collins maintains a warm bedside manner as well as a writer as he does as a researcher, NIH leader, and physician. His homespun manner makes his writing relatable and engaging. It is obvious that he cares about patients as the center of all his work - a nice trait for a driven, big-time researcher to have.

The science described in this book continued trends I sensed while I was a medical student. The question of who-has-what-genes will likely guide science for the better part of my life. Collins engages these questions with the latest (as of the time of his writing) science has to offer. Genetics is indeed a fun field to follow.

Genetics opens up a whole host of research and ethical questions that is currently engaging us as a society. Is gene therapy (which surely is coming) ethical? To what extent do genomics play God? And to what extent are our genes reflections on our experience as much as our heredity? Is religion going to play the role of being merely against technology or will it sublimate itself to aid healing? What will the medical clinic look like in 2050? Also, what will the birth process (and the electronic medical record) look like in 2050?

Collins' book is a good primer to these issues. Listening to it has been a joy for the past couple of weeks.
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Pretty good introduction to personalized medicine and genomics. I wouldn't recommend it to folks who have read more than one or two books in the area, but I did enjoy hearing the voice of Francis Collins, one of the more famous leaders in the field. ( )

If you could learn whether you had a genetic pre-disposition to a disease, would you want to know? Would it make a difference? ( )