“Instead of giving every patient the same medication at the same dose, what if your doctor could actually peer into your genome and choose the medication and dose that was right for you? For many years, electronic medical record systems have been able to look up your existing medications when your doctor prescribes a new one to check for possibly dangerous interactions between these and the new drug. We started to think that these systems could be co-opted to also look up your genome. If we were going to properly explore the entirety of a patient’s genome from a medical perspective, we certainly needed an approach to drug therapy. What we needed was a database of pharmacogenomic variants. Well, as luck would have it, there was Russ Altman.”