Book review

摘要

It is almost a half-century since Friedrich Vogel coined the term pharmacogenetics, although the idea that individual response to a drug could have a genetic basis was already well established in the 1950s with, for example, the discovery of pseudocholinesterase deficiency and isoniazid acetylator status. Fifty years on, we know that most drug responses are not regulated in such an overtly Mendelian way with a single dominant gene effect. A current list of genetically determined drug responses would run to several hundreds, but it catalogues gene variants that are usually rare in the general population and have large effects on the protein they encode-often inactivating them.