Oreste Salavaggione The Concise Encyclopedia of Genomic Diseases: Genomics and Disease Prevention

The Concise Encyclopedia of Genomic Diseases is a single-source reference for students (medicine, biology, molecular biology, genomics, bioinformatics, etc.), physicians, and biological scientists. The major objective of this work is to educate the afore-mentioned medical professionals, for the sake of genomic disease prevention, as well as for understanding the genomic basics of clinical knowledge. I am writing for medical specialists because they should be aware of the 6.2 billion base pairs of DNA to prevent disease and certain traits. They can, thus, provide a better perspective for generations to come. The book points out that those future generations will be able to decrease the number of diseases and unwanted traits, depending on initiatives that can be taken by lawmakers, decision makers, and religious groups. My hope in writing the book is that my approach sensitizes trainers of medical students and decision makers for medical school programs to first train students to have deep knowledge in genomics. Then, they obtain the clinical knowledge to interpret the clinical syndrome. The current medical programs require students to do exactly the opposite. By this, I mean that medical students first receive a depth of clinical knowledge, and are later taught about genomics. In other words, in this book I suggest that medical students should start by understanding that the genomic changes that produce each disease have happened over hundreds or thousands of years ago, depending on the type of the disease. Then, the students should have access to the clinical description of each disease, in terms of the recently acquired genomic knowledge. This method will allow students to better understand the discipline by making better sense of the clinical syndromes altogether instead of focusing solely on a small amount of data for each test section.