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One of the preconceptions that people have about "personalized medicine" is that it comes down to pharmaceuticals - that we'll use our personal information, most likely genetic information, to identify specific drugs that will work best for us. The problem with this conception, though, is that it still assumes a reactive medical establishment, where we're stuck treating chronic disease, rather than taking decisive action earlier to ward off disease altogether. (Another problem is the lack of such drugs in the pharma pipeline, but that's another issue.)

Despite the holiday doldrums, there's been lots of great responses out there to my Truth About Cancer story in Wired. But my favorite is this amusing tidbit: Friends know I'm an avid cyclist - inspired, in fact, by my father in law, a ferocious cyclist and athlete who died of bladder cancer in 2001. The closest I've come to fandom in recent years is rooting on Lance Armstrong through his seven Tour De France wins (very eager to see what happens this year with his comeback).

One of the key components of making the right health decisions is - and ever will be - having the right information from which to decide. In today's world of blood tests and screening exams and Gleason scores, this seems pedestrian. But the fact is that medicine only began quantifying health in the early 1900s, with the notion of high blood pressure, and it was well into the 1950s before individuals became aware of their numbers. I read recently that FDR's blood pressure was high for nearly a decade, hovering as high as 200/150- astronomical, by today's standards -for years, and was locked at 260/150 near his death from, yup, heart disease. But with no treatment available, the number was simply a warning that, maybe, he should cut back on smoking a bit.

A couple observations on the official announcement today that Obama will nominate Tom Daschle as secretary of Health and Human Services as well as oversee an office of healthcare reform. This officially designates healthcare as a leading issue for the administration - but not in the 100 days sense. Daschle talked about a process of several years, which may be simply a way to carve out some breathing room but also to avoid the impression that they'll go in there guns-a-blazin' like Clinton did in 1992, only to come up empty (is that one metaphor or two?). Also, very intriguing to hear Daschle talk about soliciting input from all Americans, via house meetings (Daschle promises to sit in on a few) and suggestions posted on Change.gov. “Over the next few weeks, we will be coordinating thousands of healthcare discussions in homes all across the country through our Web site, change.gov, where ordinary Americans can share their ideas about what's broken and how to fix it,” Daschle said.

Let's assume that pretty much every smoker in the U.S. knows cigarettes are bad for them. And let's that assume that "bad for them" is understood as likely to kill them. Someday. But in the meantime, before that"someday" happens, millions of people continue to smoke, until for more than 400,000 Americans, someday becomes today. And that's just death - according to the CDC, about nine million Americans suffer some 13 million smoking-attributable health problems every year. No wonder the U.S. spends more than $75 billion in smoking-related health costs every year.

My latest story in Wired, a profile of geneticist George Church, is in the August issue, now on the stands (and online here).

In some regard, it's a follow-up to my previous story on personal genomics. But it is really my effort to shine the light on one person who's doing so much to propell us towards the future of genomics. Church is frighteningly intelligent, yet notably calm and kind (and generous with his time, explaining for me, for instance, the principles of synthetic biology again and again until some of it got through).

On a NYTimes blog, a harrowing tale of the conflict between religious extremism and the WHO in Pakistan. Fearful that the polio vaccine causes impotence (it doesn't), local clerics in northern Pakistan waged a campaign against the vaccine, and Unicef called off its immunization effort. The result: The first case of polio in the area since 2003. Some fascinating overlaps with the war against the Taliban in the area. Worth a read - and a longer exploration by someone.

We are too fat. The CDC is reporting today that the United States is now officially more than one-quarter obese. In the latest issue of the MMWR, the numbers are staggering: 25.6 percent of American adults are clinically obese, according to a body-mass-index assessment, up from 23.9% in 2005 and way up from 15.3% in 1995.

And note that's obese, not overweight: when you include those numbers, defined as a BMI greater than 25, the percentage approaches two-thirds of all American adults.