Several years ago I participated in a military thought experiment to imagine medicine in the year 2020.

The Buck Rogersesque project explored scenarios already under construction. The project grappled with the fact that current medicine will be superceded by "nanomedicine" a.k.a. genetic or molecular medicine. Imagine a microchip inserted under your fingernail that sorts your blood cells by forcing them through a tree-like structure. The sorted cells trigger biochemical markers indicate a trove of genetic information. Then the chip either automatically transmits the information or you plug your finger into a convenient receptacle which gives you your genetic report card. The report would reveal whether you smoked, drank, or took drugs last night. It might forecast when dementia or arthritis would express themselves. As if this knowledge weren't enough, it would be possible to tinker with your genetic anomalies through a host of interventions—drugs, stem cell injections, and makeovers that Elizabeth Arden could hardly imagine.

Welcome to twenty-first century medicine! If you thought you had braved Y2K and New Year's headaches and avoided millennial apocalyptic events, you might be blindsided by the effect molecular medicine is beginning to have. We commence the millennium with a genetics issue of the Bulletin because we imagine that advances in molecular biology will not only radically alter medicine, its provision, and definitions of health and well-being, but that it might find religiously minded people unprepared for the confrontation between faith and genetics.

First, as Cindy Cohen's article clearly expresses: there is no one religious view on genetics, especially with related stem cell technology. Second, Byron Sherwin, Mary White, and Ron Cole-Turner discuss how genetic information and interventions raise questions about identity, the nature of God, and the meaning of genetic defects and suffering. Will religious traditions simply ignore, react, or be prepared when health care professionals and other faithful find themselves in the morass of genetics decision making? Third, imagine again that the fingernail readout shows you have a gene in your brain chemistry that predisposes you to altruism, anger, or sociopathy. How can praise and blame be assigned for these moral actions if our genes determine them? What if our genes are also found in other genomes—dogs, fruit flies, or bacteria? Are these evolutionary traits and what will this do for school debates over teaching of creationism or evolution?

Genetics progress in our new millennium, for all the hope it promises, needs a faith context. Faith traditions can sit on their theologies and let genetic progress define what is most valuable in health and healing, or they can emabrace and transform the opportunities brought by nanomedicine. Happy New Year.