Craig Venter and Tim O’Reilly chat: when 2 worlds meet
Posted by attilachordash on October 24, 2007
Biotech is the next infotech (or at least the 2 worlds need to be merged) and it is good to detect the signs of the growing biotech interest on part of the general tech crowd. At the Web 2.0 summit (organised by and for the Silicon Valley tech-media establishment) Tim O’ Reilly asked Craig Just Sequenced Venter. I suggest everyone watching the video below. It was not a terrific dialogue though as we’ve seen 2 people with a very different background talking about Venter’s discipline. I loved to hear the words ‘SNPs’ or ‘mitochondria ‘coming from Venter’s mouth in front of the biotechnologically still illiterate IT and web technology elite (my assumption, not tested statistically).
The other remarkable thing was Venter’s doubts regarding the current commercialized genetics service that personalized medicine and bioweb startups like 23andMe (no other companies was used as a reference) can offer at this moment. Venter explained why those early services could give misleading information to their clients but instead of analyzing his thoughts here I suggest to interpret his arguments based on watching the talk.
All the Web 2.0 summit talks are available at blip.tv.
What’s on the web? (24 October 2007) « ScienceRoll said
[...] Craig Venter and Tim O’Reilly chat: when 2 worlds meet (Pimm): Although most of scientists don’t like Venter, I believe he’s doing his job perfectly. [...]