Health is is a state of optimal physical mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity

Dorland's Medical Dictionary

The military makes it a prerequisite that a new recruit must undergo a detailed or comprehensive medical examination. The purpose of this is to assess the health status of an individual to determine if he or she will be a suitable candidate. Until now, this has been conducted upon the basis that a medical examination is a definitive health assessment. As noted above, Dorland's Medical Dictionary essentially states that health is a more expansive concept and would ideally consider the actual functional state of the body as well. The next question is whether or not this is possible.

In the world of science and technology, enormous strides have been made in the last ten years. Businesses have been created, grown to profitable levels and died in less than five years. Instantaneous communication is now available at little or no cost worldwide. Expectations have changed and more is expected of our institutions performance wise. Clinical medicine has been challenged in this new world. We now know that there is great uncertainty in diagnosis. Through epidemiology, the field that studies disease patterns in populations, we can definitively state that clinical observation is not a science. Yerulshalmy's classical work on chest films, especially in tuberculosis detection demonstrates this well. Tuberculosis specialists varied greatly in the simple reading of the same chest film. We now know that only 15% of medical practice is based upon scientific evidence. Indeed, in the scientific world, clinical diagnoses by themselves are undependable indicators of disease for study. These comments are not made to implicate well meaning and competent clinicians, but merely illustrate that decisions made based upon potentially unreliable or inaccurate observation can have serious consequences, especially in immigration. We therefore know that there is an error rate to practice.

Since the scientific community often predates the medical profession in innovation, what are pertinent new developments which can more completely address the question of health and improve this situation? More germane to the discussion, how can such scientific advancement aid the military in streamlining its procedures. Specifically, how could you improve processing and reduce backlogs?

This presentation will show that a highly respected and growing area of science, DNA Repair, can be a tool to cut through all the medical details and provide an unified view on an applicant's health status, both for the present and the future. This branch of cyenetics was truly born in the late 1940s during a scientific experiment where two independent researchers observed that experimentally damaged microorganisms somehow became more viable when exposed to light. The term DNA Repair itself was not even coined until the 1960s. Pioneers in genetics were late to realize the importance of this new area called ecogenetics (see Glossary). Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the double helix, stated in 1974 that they had totally missed DNA Repair, a process he described as "precious". Its ascension to its point of respect today destroyed the notion that the genetic code was immutable and unassailable. Far from this, science now recognizes that DNA is attacked and damaged daily. However, the vast majority of this damaged is corrected by the wisdom of the body and because of this, life goes on. Without it and the body's continual process of self-replacement, human beings would have a life span of 230 days. We would simply be a multi-cellular organism with limited intelligence and consciousness. Geneticists say that the main purpose of the gene is to perpetuate itself. It is breakdowns in this system that is responsible for 90% of disease expression. Since 1949, DNA Repair science has grown to the point where in 1994, the prestigious journal, Science, declared DNA Repair the Molecule of the Year. In so doing, it announced that this field was now at the centre of all cell biology and cancer research. The field has continued to grow and in the late part of the 20th century, NATO's Advanced Study Institute convened an international conference on DNA Repair because of its central role in disease development. Figure I shows that DNA Damage has two possible results in human populations.