GRIDLOCK germinated in a flight from San Francisco to Florida. The isolation of that cross-country trip with recycled jetliner air led to ruminations over my work in a New York hospital. While updating computer networks in Beth Israel Medical Center, I saw firsthand how biology and computers were converging. Petri dishes and microscopes were being replaced with databases and computer workstations. All quite ho hum. But no. It was the dawn of personlized medicine. And I hadn't heard a whisper about it. Even fewer knew the human genome was being decoded. The advancement came like a tidal wave ... steadily reshaping everything in its wake. Mainstream practices would soon become ancient history. The digital revolution had wound its way to the doctor's office where it was transforming medicine and rewriting healthcare...the same way it had disrupted the newspaper, music, book, and movie industries. Landing in Fort Lauderdale, I pondered the new reality: Customized treatments were replacing one-size-fits-all drugs. Scientists were unlocking the secrets of DNA to find our susceptibilities to disease so precision treatment could become the norm. Since diseases like cancer were (are) as individual as a fingerprint, the breakthrough would extend the lives of hundreds of millions. But modernization is never simple. Healthcare is the biggest industry in the world with countless careers and fortunes hanging in the balance. Surely there would be fierce detractors to this change. But how far would opponents go to halt scientific progress?