Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

by David A. Sinclair

Yet in the United States alone, with one of the better health care systems in the world, about 5 percent of cancer patients, or 86,500 people, are misdiagnosed every year.

“What we call ‘good medicine’ is doing what works for most of the people most of the time,” Boguski told me. “But not everyone is most people.”

In the vast majority of cases in which cancer is found where it was found in Lawan’s body, it is indeed lung cancer. But now that we can detect the genetic signature of specific forms of cancer, using the place where you find the cancer as the only guide for what treatment to use is as ridiculous as categorizing an animal species based on where you’ve located it. It is like saying a whale is a fish because they both live in water.

One of these assumptions is that males and females are essentially the same. We’re all too slowly coming around to the shameful recognition that, for most of medical history, our treatments and therapies have been based on what was best for males,6 thus hindering healthy clinical outcomes for females. Males don’t just differ from females at a few sites in the genome; they have a whole other chromosome.

Treatments that work through insulin or mTOR signaling typically favor females, whereas chemical therapies typically favor males, and no one really knows why.8

It won’t be long before prescribing a drug without first knowing a patient’s genome will seem medieval.