Rational medicines or rationed care?; NAS pesticide plant study

Last week's Science included an editorial by Robin Fears and George Poste of SmithKline Beecham in which the authors advocate an industry partnership with the U.K.'s National Health Service (NHS) to promote the use of patient information and biological samples to develop genomics-based medicines.

They argued that such a partnership could make the difference between two alternatives. On one hand is "rational care based on molecular medicine," whereby preventative and therapeutic approaches are directed at those populations that would benefit from them. The alternative, said Fears and Poste, is the "progressive rationing of increasingly constrained health care resources" if the current system continues unchanged...