Getty Images
A Boeing engineer tells me that a modern airplane has about 10,000 sensors constantly recording information, not only to inform pilots about the plane's performance but also to forecast mechanical problems that can be corrected during routine maintenance. The system works extraordinarily well; there are about 10 million commercial airline flights a year in the United States alone with only a few crashes.
Analogous information systems exist in our bodies that could forewarn of imminent disease and allow preventative action. The human genome encodes 20,000 or so genes, ultimately producing hundreds of thousands of different proteins. The amounts and forms of these molecules likely contain complete diagnostic information for our state of health if only we could read them all.
Those that we can read reveal the enormous promise that will come from being able to read more. Chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), for example, illustrates the important role ...
