Eric Lander, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lander is a Rhodes scholar originally trained as a mathematician, and now quite possibly the country's leading molecular geneticist. He is the founder of one of the world's first and best genome-sequencing centers (the Whitehead Institute / MIT Center for Genome Research) and one of a small coterie of visionaries behind the Human Genome Project.
When Lander visualizes the future, one image comes to mind: scornful doctors. "When people tried to treat infectious disease 150 years ago, they had no clue what the cause was - namely that there were these nasty microorganisms that caused the disease," he says. "They were just shooting in the dark. That's what we still do." Doctors of the future will look on our medicine with "bemusement and horror," he says, just as we look at the use of leeches. "They'll site around, saying, 'Can you believe they gave poisons to people to kill their cancers?'" says Lander. "And that is the reward we'll get - we will be considered medieval."
Source: Newsweek, Special Edition, Your Health in the 21st Century, "The Shape of Things to Come', Summer 2005, p.44.
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