[From genomics to therapeutics]

The sequencing of the human genome will be achieved in the first years of the next century. This program is often presented as constituting a huge hope for medicine. It is sometimes expected that a disease-free world is a realistic prospect for tomorrow. Otherwise, the future of therapeutics is viewed as characterized by a personalized medicine in which each person will be preventively or curatively treated in function of its genetic make-up, assuring a maximal efficacy and the absence of toxicity. In fact, we have to be cautious, even if, indeed, progress are expected in chemotherapy and biological therapies. Expected difficulties will arise from the nature of the main diseases persisting in the developed countries, and from the economical situation in the developing ones. Fortunately for the modern doctors, their grand-grand children will still have the possibility to become themselves doctors: patients requiring treatments will still be there!