To advance medicine’s future, the NIH tries to win the trust of communities mistreated in the past
CHICAGO — The National Institutes of Health would like six vials of your blood, please.
Its scientists would like to take a urine sample, measure your waistline, and have access to your electronic health records and data from the wearable sensor on your wrist. And if you don’t mind sharing, could they have your Social Security number?
It is a big ask, the NIH knows, and of an equally big group — the agency eventually hopes to enroll over 1 million participants in the next step of what four researchers referred to in a 2003 paper as “a revolution in biological research.”
The appeals, however, are befitting the biggest-ever bet on precision medicine, now more than a decade in the making. The paper’s lead author, Dr. Francis Collins, has been devoted to the project from its inception, riding his vision for a more precise world of medical treatment to his current post as the NIH’s director.
The data-gathering experiment, dubbed “All of Us,” is an important stop on the way to making personalized medicine a reality around the world, Collins and others say. The NIH hopes that the trove of information could one day enable doctors to use increasingly precise
