Diseasome

Diseasome is an interactive map that visualizes the links between hundreds of different diseases and genes. It does a good job of illustrating how many of the diseases humans are diagnosed with are anything but random, and how having one disease can indicate that you are susceptible to many others. I am personally interested in this because several members of my family have recently been diagnosed with cancer, but all of them have had different types of cancer: lung, breast, and pancreatic. Seeing this visualization helped me to understand that these diseases are all genetically linked, and has therefore helped me to bridge a lack of understanding about the role of genes in cancer. While this map doesn’t really illuminate much about the research being done into specific diseases, it does illustrate that we are forming an ever-clearer picture of the human genome and represents hope for those of us who know we are at risk for serious illnesses.