Pharmacogenetics is not a particularly old science.The idea that there were genetically determined differences in drug response can be traced back as far as only about 70 years ago.The term pharmacogenetics itself was coined in 1959 by Vogel.Towards the end of the 20th Century, the genomics revolution allowed some morphing of the original genetics approach to create the new science of Pharmacogenomics.With the development of increasing high throughput and financially accessible technologies, there has been a heightened expectation that the pharmacogenomics approach will lead to greater precisions and sensitivities in understanding variations in the individuals genome, thus paving the way to the delivery of more personalized forms of pharmacotherapy.There have been some successes, and much promise of even greater success.But by and large the success rate so far has been disappointingly low given the amount of money spent in the search for personalized therapeutics.Most of the successes relate to responder/non responder situations, while pharmacogenomic interventions related to pharmacokinetic process have generally only had ambiguous benefits.