Editorial

Abstract

While the need for systematic research, there is still a place, and an important one, for the shrewd, and sometimes fortuitous clinical observation. At the bottom of this observation, there. is a clinician capable of singling out, among the vast stream of every-day clinical information, the item which bears novelty or points to, maybe even explains, a mechanism htherto unknown, or poorly understood. No largescale effort of robotic medicine will do away with this need for serendipity in clinical medicine, and it is not &ficult to predict that the human genome project w i l l rather increase the value of such observations which help, in many ways, to translate basic science hack intn clinical practice or to ask new questions. Singling out new entities among the myriad appearances of human disease bears that @ty of novelty, even if it is sometimes crude in the beginning and in need of subsequent refinement.