Cancer is very personal. That’s brought home in the lead paragraph of the lead story of this issue, Building a Better Mouse. The patient with lung cancer asks her doctor if she might qualify for a promising targeted therapy now in Phase III trials, and—after testing positive for the ALK mutation—her oncologist connects her with the responsible research team. We don’t get to hear the outcome of this story, but we’re inspired to ponder three new paradigms: participatory medicine, pharmacogenomics, and the open science movement.
Becoming experts on their own life-threatening diseases has only become plausible for a subset of the population with the advent of the Internet. Access to information is their lifeline—information about the best doctors, hospitals, and therapies from myriad sources including the latest journal articles, popular media, obscure case histories, and networking with similarly afflicted individuals. Those patients who accept Stephen Jay Gould’s famous dictum (based ...
