Introduction

There is little doubt that humans have entered the “genetic” age, where the effort to understand and alter humanity’s basic underlying code has become foremost in the minds of many scientists while many media outlets have declared the “21st century will be the age of genetics” (e.g., 2). The advances made in sequencing the human genome in the early 2000s – as well as other species’ genomes – promised “to help convert this growing knowledge into treatments that can lengthen and enrich lives” (1). Since the early 2000s, information regarding pieces of the “genetic story” have continued to be revealed with continued hope that precision medicine – or treatments tailored to each of us based on our underlying genetic code – will become commonplace.