This week in health: India’s fight against rare diseases, Supreme Court’s ban on Patanjali ads and the rocky vista of medicinal cannabis research.
In April 2003, there was much jubilation, justifiably so, across the world as the Human Genome Project announced that it had generated the first sequence of the human genome. It had truly opened up vistas and facilitated a better understanding of the human body, how it works, how it fails and what we need to do to treat patients. This landmark achievement meant that we now had “fundamental information about the human blueprint”, which was predicted to, and indeed, has since accelerated the study of human biology and improved the practice of medicine. India first sequenced a complete human genome in 2006, but last week’s announcement that the government had completed its ‘10,000 genome’ project too was significant. As Jacob Koshy explains, the ‘10,000 genome’ project — an attempt to create a reference database of…