Expert: Sridhar Acharya Malkaram - 5/16/2011

Question
With all these news articles about how researchers are discovering parts of our DNA that could lead to diseases and other health problems. For example, recently, researcher found a part in our DNA that they believe to possibly to be linked to obesity. With further identification of these DNA markers and with continued research and development in the subject, do you possibly foresee a future where after birth, newborns receive a full DNA scan for these genetic markers and treatment and precautions can be taken to prevent problems later down the road in a person's life.

Answer
Your prediction is very much as per the current trends in research. This is what the fields like "personalized medicine" and "personalized nutrition" are all about. Significant progress is being made in the modern genetic research, especially in research approach called "Systems Biology", which tries to investigate in a holistic manner, taking into account the whole genome, the markers, and its interactions with other cellular components, to predict the behavior of the organism. It does this by making comprehensive models that could be simulated to test its behavior under various conditions. Recent advances in High-throughput methods like genome sequencing, advances in protein and metabolite identification and most importantly the developments in the computer algorithms for integrating all this information to create such models, are making this possible. I believe (and as per experts in this field, as far as I read about it) very soon (in a decade or so) we will be having the kind of facilities that you mentioned.