T he S c i e n c e package. A leading force in bipartisan public/private advocacy is Research!America, whose polls have documented the strong support for biomedical research.2 We have reached what has been called "the end of the beginning" in a new era of genomics and its applications toward predictive, preventive, personalized, and participatory (P4) healthcare.3Several major challenges remain to be addressed. Many believe that the scientific community needs to more meaningfully engage the general public to help people understand what is being done scientifically and medically and elicit their help in directing national priorities. In the face of many competing priorities for federal investment, we also must find a way to sustain adequate levels of funding for what can be characterized as the most productive life sciences R&D agenda in the world. Funding support may well be bolstered by efforts within the scientific community to translate basic scientific advances into effective and efficient clinical applications—and to see to it that proven therapies, especially cost effective therapies, find their way quickly into patient care in everyday practice. Finally, we must provide perspective on the conflicts between increasing demands for healthcare, and the willingness and ability of consumers, taxpayers, and employers to pay for healthcare whose costs continue to grow much faster than the general economy or the tax base. Understanding the New Science of Genomics as an Enginefor Advancing Research According to Francis Collins, while on leave from the University of Michigan to direct the National Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health, "Mapping the human genetic terrain may rank with the great expeditions of Lewis and Clark, Edmund Hillary, and the Apollo Program."4 (Collins was ■II III I III! mi niEiiiiiiiim mi i i n u n i ■mu i nmni i 11mi ■■ihiihb him llllill IBIIII till IHil I ■IIHIIBMI1IIII III II Hill I llllill hi minima Section of the human genome 25
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDMwNDAx