The 4th Tan Tock Seng Hospital Oration: challenge for the medical profession in the 21st century.

Mr Chairman, Distinguished Guests, Friends and Colleagues: I am greatly honoured to speak at the 4 TTSH Oration following such distinguished luminaries like Dr Chew Chin Hin, Dr Chen Ai Ju and Professor N Balachandran. I also wish to thank all of you who are present this evening. We are indeed fortunate to be alive at this moment in history. We are not only entering a new millennium—we are witnessing a new dawn in medicine—a future that is both exhilarating and yet frightening but one that holds great promise and which will change the practice of medicine forever. In the next hour, I will try to show you some glimpses of this new dawn and persuade you that the future is now. I will concentrate on 5 areas—this is more from personal bias rather than any academic reason. They are (1) age and ageing, (2) alternative medicine, (3) AIDS, (4) the human genome and (5) the information revolution.