If this scenario come to pass, the pandemic threat will ultimately be defeated by a different kind of map - not maps of lives and deaths on a city street, or bird flu outbreaks, but maps of nucleotides wrapped in a double helix. Our hability to analyze the genetic composition of any life-form has made astonishing progress over the past ten years, but in many ways we are at the very beginning of the genomic revolution.

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(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)