When the inaugural issue of the Harvard Health Letter was published in November 1975, it was the first general health newsletter for the public at large. In its 30th anniversary issue, the newsletter looks back on how health and medicine have changed and speculates about what the next 30 years might bring.

Dr. Anthony Komaroff, editor in chief of the Harvard Health Letter, notes that in the mid-1970s, medical science had just recently figured out how to manipulate DNA and determine the structure of individual genes. The understanding of how lifestyle affects health was also in its infancy.

The relationship between doctors and patients was shifting. “With the Vietnam War just ending and the Watergate scandal a recent memory, many Americans were less inclined to trust authority from any quarter, including doctors. They were more likely to say, ‘Don’t tell me what to do, doctor. Tell me my options,’” explains Dr. Komaroff.

That was the world into which the Harvard Health Letter was born. What will the next 30 years bring? Advances in medical treatment based on genes, predicts the Health Letter, and possibly important insights into the biological basis of thought, consciousness, and memory.

The 30th anniversary issue surveys developments in:

heart disease, such as learning the major impact cholesterol levels have on risk, the role of inflammation in atherosclerosis, and powerful new technologies for diagnosis and treatment cancer, such as new imaging techniques and screening tests disease prevention, in the form of scientific evidence of how powerful the effects of diet and exercise are on health, for better and for worse genetics, including the mapping of the human genome and identifying a growing number of genes that influence disease risk obesity, including the discovery of the many genes that control appetite and metabolism the growing use of organ transplants to treat diseases, along with the development of new surgical techniques, new methods to determine donor-recipient match, and more powerful and less toxic immunosuppressant drugs stem cell research, which offers the potential to treat many major diseases and several other areas of medicine.

The birthday issue concludes with a remembrance by Health Letter founders Dr. Timothy Johnson, now the medical editor for ABC news, and Dr. Stephen E. Goldfinger, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. They discuss how publishing health information has changed over the past 30 years—and how important it continues to be.