Thirty-five years ago journalist Tom Wolfe anointed the ‘70s in America the Me Decade—critiquing the quest for self-actualization via primal-scream therapy, high colonics, and mysticism. The age of social consciousness and hippie communalism had given way, he suggested, to a reawakening of that quintessentially American quality described by Tocqueville in the 1830s: individualism.
Four decades later, genomics has ushered in its own era of Me, revealing that heterogeneity is the rule, not the exception, when it comes to cancer. According to George Lundberg, former editor of JAMA and the Medscape Journal of Medicine, writing in this month’s Thought Experiment, our rapidly evolving knowledge about the uniqueness of each person’s genome demands a new model of publishing. Journals must reflect the current findings in cancer research, he says, where “the proper study of me is me.” Lundberg’s latest nonprofit organization, Cancer Commons (disclosure: I sit on the editorial board), applies this ...
