Why did Berkeley decide to tackle the topic of Personalized Medicine?
Each year UC Berkeley looks for a theme for our On The Same Page program that would engage incoming students with our faculty in deep and meaningful discussion about important societal issues. Rapid advances in genetic technologies are ushering in an era of personalized medicine in which each individual’s genome sequence can be determined and used to help physicians better prevent, diagnose, and treat disease. To take full advantage of these opportunities, scientists will have to figure out new ways to decipher this genetic information and society will have to consider its implications. With great strength in the biomedical sciences and computational biology as well as in the social sciences and humanities, UC Berkeley is uniquely positioned to engage some of our nation’s brightest young students in a discussion of this new frontier. This type of broad, scholarly discussion of an important societal issue is what makes Berkeley special. From a learning perspective, our goal is to delive
