Outlook

Alcohol intake boosts the risk of cancers of the liver, breast and colon, but it seems to reduce the risk of kidney cancer.

We need to combine epidemiology and exposures research to fulfil the potential of precision medicine, say John Leppert and Chirag Patel.

The first medical interventions were often individualized but ineffective, because doctors lacked an understanding of disease biology. As medicine became more scientific, physicians started grouping patients by disease. Now, genetic insights let doctors consider their patients' unique make-up when prescribing treatments.

Precision oncology has not been shown to work, and perhaps it never will, says Vinay Prasad.

Living with a rare disease but no concrete diagnosis can be difficult. Genetic sequencing may finally provide a solution.

Remarkable progress in sequencing technologies and data handling is making personalized genome analysis an increasingly common feature of health care.

It may not be possible to protect the identity of genomic data. But how much of a problem is that?

Personalized prescribing is gaining momentum, but is there enough evidence for it to become standard clinical practice?

The US Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI) aims to gather health data on at least one million volunteers. Kathy Hudson, deputy director for science, outreach and policy at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), led its creation, and spoke to Nature about the challenges she faced.

When data-gathering precision-medicine projects build trust with their users, patients and researchers both benefit.

After a series of setbacks, genetic therapies are finally moving beyond small academic trials towards approval as treatments.

More money than ever is being invested in research and development. Countries that previously spent little are now pumping money into science to secure their future economic growth. By Alla Katsnelson, infographic by Alisdair Macdonald.

Singapore has made impressive progress towards putting science at the centre of its economy — but can it afford to continue on its trajectory?

Fostering the connection between science funding and economic growth needs to be based on thoughtful measurement, says Julia Lane.

A decade of economic growth has not led to a renaissance of Russian research.

Chinese researchers are benefiting as the government looks to science to lead the economic transition to become a world-leader in the production of high-value technology.

The Boston region has become a hotbed for life-science jobs, thanks to a constant push to meld research and industry.

Germany's Excellence Initiative was highly debated. With its successor approved, scientists are asking whether equality and scientific freedom can be preserved in a world of competition.