Precision Medicine Should Play a Role in Population-Based Health Care

Perhaps no debate is more intense in all of clinical investigative medicine than the one on the relevance of focusing studies on population based versus molecular-based strategies. Certain academic commentators have even used the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic to highlight their arguments that the National Institutes of Health and other funding agencies should spend less on understanding disease entities at the molecular level and far more on illnesses affecting large populations. This never-ending argument misses the most critical point, which is the basic observation that these 2 approaches to human disease are complementary rather than in conflict or opposition.

To be clear,...