"King’s proposal is more than just a new approach to cancer screening. This is a watershed moment for all genetic testing, which is currently used in a highly targeted manner—usually for people at clear risk of a disease, or to confirm a diagnosis based on existing symptoms. For years, scientists have imagined a world in which genetic testing is done for everybody, possibly even at birth, so that diseases can be avoided rather than managed. But imagination and obvious clinical utility are very different things. King’s proposal is the first to focus on dramatically expanding the use of an existing and proven genetic test, making her plea far more likely to resonate with medical professionals and the patients they serve. (Whether the insurance companies who pay them will heed the call is another story entirely.)"
 "Health-care is about more than simply applying science and technology to diseases. Questions about how they will be applied in practice need to be addressed. For example, what does “patient benefit” mean to healthcare professionals and to patients? How are test results communicated and stored across medical specialities, and which tests require special handling? (For example, information provided by tests that concern an individual or family member’s future health or disease.)
"It isn’t all roses. There is a joke among the genetic community that you can get
your DNA sequenced for $1,000, but it will cost $1,000,000 to interpret it. DNA is complex. Each of us contains six billion nucleotides that are arranged like letters in a book that tell a unique story. And while scientists have deciphered the alphabet that makes up the billions of letters of our genome, we know woefully little about its vocabulary, grammar and syntax. The problem is that if you want to learn how to read, you need books, lots of them, and up until recently we had very few books to learn from." Read full article... "It might sound difficult to define what makes a smart company, but you know one when you see it. When such a company commercializes a truly innovative technology, things happen: leadership in a market is bolstered or thrown up for grabs. Competitors have to refine or rethink their strategies.
Almost 25 years after the Human Genome Project launched, and a little over a decade after it reached its goal of reading all three billion base pairs in human DNA, genome sequencing for the masses is finally arriving. It will no longer be just a research tool; reading all of your DNA (rather than looking at just certain genes) will soon be cheap enough to be used regularly for pinpointing medical problems and identifying treatments. This will be an enormous business, and one company dominates it: Illumina. The San Diego–based company sells everything from sequencing machines that identify each nucleotide in DNA to software and services that analyze the data. In the coming age of genomic medicine, Illumina is poised to be what Intel was to the PC era—the dominant supplier of the fundamental technology." Read full article.... Visit www.illumina.com "Jim Watson was asked to give a tour of the future. He believes that DNA science should be used to change the human race. His views are both extraordinary and extremely controversial. Watson argues for a new kind of eugenics -- where parents are allowed to choose the DNA of their children -- to make them healthier, more intelligent, even better looking. His vision may be disagreeable, yet it's a natural consequence of the decades of scientific exploration launched by his and Francis Crick's discovery of the double helix. It's worth considering what effect the advancements in genetic science may have on our future." |
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