Gene maps lead medicine down the wrong road.

IN 1957, THE YEAR I entered college, the American Medical Association issued its "Principles of Medical Ethics." Section 10 stated, "The honored ideals of the medical profession imply that the responsibility of the physician extends not only to the individual, but also to society ... [with] the purpose of improving both the health and the well-being of the individual and the community." Improving the health of the individual remains an honored ideal of the medical profession and one that has served as the guiding principle behind government funding of basic biomedical research. But, improving the health of the entire community in our deeply individualistic society is an ideal more easily articulated than practiced and the wave of enthusiasm for decoding the human genome is distancing medicine even further from its community responsibility.