Medicine tailored to your genome, not your race: Venter

In 2000, a team led by Venter and a publicly-funded rival effort simultaneously unveiled the world’s first two completely sequenced human genomes. Writing in the journal Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, Venter and his colleagues looked at six genes known to play key roles in metabolising medicine.
Three of the genes were identical, but the other three showed variations that could result in sharply different reactions between the two men to several common drugs. Venter, for example, had a variant of the CYP2D6 gene that helps metabolise certain medications prescribed for depression, psychosis and arrhythmia, an irregular beating of the heart.
In Watson, however, the same gene was different enough such that none of these drugs would be likely to function as intended.
Anti-cancer medication as well as drugs to prevent blood clots and hypertension would also have different effects on the two men due to differences in two other genes, the study found. Sometimes having the wrong version of a gene can help made a medicine toxic, contributing to a syndrome called adverse drug reaction (ADR).
In the United States alone, there are more than two million cases of ADR ever year, about 100,000 of them fatal.