John Stanford
speaker
1,479 appearances
11 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 13 Aug
John Stanford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 11 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.
Appearances
And that shift is the foundation of precision medicine that we talk about today.
A tumor can now be analyzed for genetic mutations that may reveal which treatment is most likely to work.
A rare disease that once went unexplained may be traced to a single genetic alteration.
Some medicines can be paired with diagnostic tests that identify the patients most likely to benefit.
And now, in certain cases, medicine is moving beyond treating the consequences of a genetic error to correcting the error itself.
This is the moment of gene and cell therapies.
Gene therapies can deliver functional genetic instructions, while cell therapies can remove a patient's immune cells, reengineer them to recognize cancer, and return them to the body.
For most of medical history, a medicine was something given to a patient.
Today, the patient's own cells can become the medicine they need.
And more likely than not, that was to be the tale of the twenty first century.
Advents in genetic medicine, precision medicine, and going deeper in what we could do to treat rare disease and the 7,000 or so conditions that exist without a medicine.
But then COVID 19 appeared, and scientists needed to produce a highly effective vaccine at a speed that astonished the world.
To many people, mRNA vaccine technology seemed to have arrived overnight.
But it had not.
More than 50 years of public and private research had established the underlying science.
Researchers had studied messenger RNA, methods of delivering it into cells, and the structure of related coronaviruses.
Scientists had also learned how to stabilize a viral protein in the shape most useful for generating an immune response.
So when the genetic sequence of the new coronavirus became available, researchers weren't starting from zero.
They were standing on decades of accumulated work.
And that's one of the central truths of the last two hundred and fifty years.
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