A few years ago, I found myself in London for a long layover and decided to head to the British Museum. I had always wanted to visit but always found myself too busy to put the site on the schedule. The British Museum houses an extraordinary collection of antiquities and art and is thought to be one the world's greatest museums for the history of human culture and is free to the public. After entering the museum I headed through the atrium to Room 24: Living and Dying. I thought this was an interesting and somewhat unusual name for a display and wanted to check out what was on display. What I found in the center of Room 24 from end to end was a vast glass case housing a quilt made of pharmaceutical drugs. The display was entitled, "Cradle to Grave" and was made by a group known as Pharmacopoeia. Pharmacopoeia are made up of Susie Freeman, Dr. Liz Lee and David Critchley.
According to Pharmacopoeia, "Cradle to Grave" was created to visually explore the modern approach to healthcare in Britain today. The quilt consists of 2 lengths, incorporates over 14,000 prescribed drugs and chronicles a woman's and man's prescribed pharmaceutical journey through their lives. Each
starts at birth with an injection of Vitamin K and immunizations. Both persons take antibiotics and prescription painkillers at various times in their lives. Each person then takes medications more specific
to their health concerns. The woman takes contraceptive pills and hormone replacement therapy and finally dies of breast cancer in her early sixties. The man has asthma and hay fever when young, smokes but has good health until his fifties . He finally stops smoking at age seventy when he gets a bad chest infection. He is treated for high blood pressure for the last ten years of his life. The man has a heart attack and dies of a stroke in his seventies. He takes as many pharmaceutical medications in the last ten years of his life as in the first sixty-six.
Along with the quilt are family photographs, mementos and captions tracing specific events in each person's life. I was totally mesmerized and spent at least an hour contemplating the quilt and the lives represented there. The life events and struggles to maintain well-being in a complicated web of life with episodes of illness.
Lining the outer walls of Room 24 were culture specific health, wellness and death rituals from remote areas of the world. Some of these displays illustrated simplicity. Simplicity juxtaposed with the best healthcare money could buy. It is difficult to guess at differences in quality of life issues or potential longevity specific to each display. Nonetheless, very thought provoking.
Fast forward to the unveiling of "Google Maps" for the humane genome. The eventual meaning of this event could eventually change the way we maintain well-being and treat illness. The field of personalized medicine based upon a person's genomic map is one step closer to reality. Scientists like Michael Snyder of Stanford caution that this is the first step in the process of a long path of discovery;
pharmaceutical drug specificity and treatments to fit the individual genetic health profile.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/09/05/160599136/scientists-unveil-google-maps-for-human-genome
A penny for your genetically profiled thoughts!
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