EZRA KLEIN is at a health-issues conference where he’s hearing some interesting counter-counter-intuitive things about the future impact of the codification of the human genome on medicine. As it turns out, it’s going to be a big deal after all. The main effect of genomics on medicine is a growing ability to tailor treatments to individual patients. Very promising. But as Mr Klein writes, it threatens to lead to “an explosion in health inequality”:

Right now, health inequality, though significant, is moderated by the fact that the marginal treatments that someone with unlimited resources can access simply don’t work that much better than the treatments someone with more modest means can access. In some cases, they’re significantly worse. In most cases, they’re pretty similar, and often literally the same.