The LavaAmp is a portable PCR thermocycler that has the potential to become the default garage biology (home biology, bioDIY, DIYbio) tool once it hits the market. Think of Apple II for personal computing or MakerBot for 3D printing.
The 1st LavaAmp prototype was shipped this week from Biodesic to Gahaga Biosciences and the process is documented and engineering details uncovered in Rob Carlson’s post.
The people behind are mainly ex SciFoo Campers and open science advocates: Guido Nunez-Mujica, Joseph Jackson, Rob Carlson, Jim Hardy and a cool engineer Rik Wehbring.
Herein, we introduce an innovative thermocycling system that
harnesses natural convection phenomena to amplify DNA rapidly by the PCR in a greatly simplified format. A key element of this design is an architecture that allows the entire thermocycling process to be actuated pseudo-isothermally by simply maintaining a single heater at a constant temperature, thereby enabling a pocket-sized battery-powered device to be constructed at a cost of about US$10.
Realizing the potential of the device and thinking about how to build a digital thermocontroller for it with the Arduino I contacted Victor Ugaz this January and was informed that they only built the proof-of-the-concept devices testing them in the lab interested mainly in ‘understanding the physics of the thermally driven flow and its effect on the reaction’. But it was obvious to me that somebody will produce those devices for the market and make them affordable to people as it seemed to me as the familiar case of the low(est)-hanging-fruit.
So when Joseph Jackson mentioned to me his grandiose open science plans and the groups’ ‘super affordable pcr’ project I became instantly interested. As Rob Carlson writes:
The intended initial customers are hobbyists and schools. The price point for new LavaAmps should be well underneath the several thousand dollars charged for educational thermocyclers that use heater blocks powered by peltier chips.
Take a look at the FDA Application Approvals 2000-2008 visualization (created by user mktlgcs) over at IBM’s Many Eyes to get an aerial view on the US. pharmaceutical industry.
Friend Dan Erlanson (Co-Editor in Chief of the niche and smart Fragment-based Drug Design blogPractical Fragments) sent me this story on the recession proof business model of a biotech company called BioBlocks and his founder medical chemist Peter Pallai:
Approximately one out of 5,000 compounds pass an initial screen, hit the designated biological target, and end up making it to clinical trials. So Pallai’s pitch is simple. He and his team are good at one thing-chemical synthesis of new drug candidates to hit those targets. By outsourcing this piece of the puzzle to his team of chemists, about 25 of whom work in Budapest, Hungary, biotech companies can get the work done fast and well, he says. It makes sense professionally for his chemists as well, because they can get steady work, rather than hitch their wagons to one of hundreds of biotechs that dream of becoming the next Genentech, but are more likely to end up flaming out in a few years.
In the past months Thomas Goetz begun writing a book on the radical changes already ongoing but mostly upcoming in healthcare due to affordable new technologies and quantitative approaches in personalized genomics and medicine.
The book is to be called The Decision Tree (explanation below) accompanied by a new website. Thomas is the perfect man for this job, he is the deputy editor of Wired magazine (=he is well informed and connected), a good journalist who took his job (writing on science, health and medicine) so seriously that he went back to school to get a degree in Public Health. Back in the days his very early coverage on 23andMe (actually published before the official launch of the service) was actually the only serious insight on 23andMe.
With this book Thomas will have a chance to become the Chris Anderson or Malcolm Gladwell of personalized medicine and public health.
“The premise is that we are at a new phase of health and medical care, where more decisions are being made by individuals on their own behalf, rather than by physicians, and that, furthermore, these decisions are being informed by new tools based on statistics, data, and predictions. This is a good thing – it will let us, the general public, live better, happier, and even longer lives. But it will require us to be stewards of our health in ways we may not be prepared for. We will act on the basis of risk factors and predictive scores, rather than on conventional wisdom and doctors recommendations. We will act in collaboration with others, drawing on collective experience with health and disease, rather than in the isolation and ignorance that can come with “privacy” concerns. And we will act early, well before symptoms appear, opting to tap the science of genomics and proteomics in order to mitigate our risks down the road.
Together, these tools will create a new opportunity and a new responsibility for people to act – to make health decisions well before they become patients. This can be characterized as a decision tree, a series of informed choices we will make to minimize uncertainty and optimize our outcomes. Indeed, we will use decision trees to navigate most of our health decisions, sometimes in overt ways – new decision support tools will both inform us and guide us, and they’ll be steeped in statistics, prediction, and the power of collective experience.”
forwarded, nonpersonal mail from Maya Kennard (you might get that email too):
Resource link/Story suggestion for your website:Title: VADLO – Biomedical Search Engine
Description: Vadlo is a search engine for the biology/biomedical scientists, educators, clinicians and reference librarians. References
Also check the Daily cartoons!
The idea is that we feed them with searches and links and they will grow big enough to give us more and more relevant searches and links. Magic concept: scalability, check the motivation behind the name choice:
Vadlo: (vud-lo) – Vadlo is a large fig tree characterized by aerial roots that eventually become accessory trunks. This allows it to grow horizontally to amazing proportions.
I find the 5 basic search categories amazing and after a short tinkering it can already throw out interesting sources:
From the about page:
Protocols category will let you search for methods, techniques, assays, procedures, reagent recipes, plasmid maps, etc. Online Tools Read the rest of this entry »
What do you think, which company launched the first commercial and comprehensive personal genome service (based on a genome-wide SNP scan) on the market and exactly when?
We have 2 candidates here in the ring deCODE Genetics (founded in 1996, Iceland) and 23andMe (founded in 2006, USA), the AmundsenandScott of personal genomics. (please don’t take the analogy too seriously)
The when is important from a historical point of view because that day will be considered as the birthday of this infant industry. The birth month and year is November 2007 for sure. That means we are just approaching the 1 year anniversary of the commercial personal genetics/genomics industry and this sounds like a good timing to think about the achievements so far and the future ahead.
But let’s figure out the exact date first and here I think we should consider the day on which a personal genome service was launched for the first time directly available to costumers and when the first public orders were taken.
I only read 1 piece so far by Erika Check Hayden, who has the exclusive freedom at Nature to always pick the best stories and write on any of them, but being a heavy 23andMe user I was instantly reminded again on the program Promethease with which I can extend the interpretation of my data with an approximately 2 hour run.
According to two commercial gene-testing services — 23andMe and deCODEme — US Army medic Timothy Richard Gall of Fort Belvoir, Virginia, has a higher-than-average risk of basal cell carcinoma, type 2 diabetes and psoriasis. But much more enlightening than these results, which cost Gall more than $1,400, was a free online program called Promethease that he used to further analyse the data. By offering more in-depth information and interpreting of more of his genetic variants, Promethease “gives a much more realistic view of the usefulness of the information”, Gall says.Start-ups and services such as Promethease are now developing ways to improve the limited value of information provided by personal genomics companies for consumers and scientists alike.
This is a golden day for 23andMe despite all crisis worries:
Mountain View, CA (PRWEB) October 30, 2008 — TIME Magazine announced today that the Personal Genome Service™ from 23andMe, Inc. has been named 2008′s Invention of the Year. 23andMe was chosen as the year’s most significant invention for its exceptional work in making personal genomics accessible and affordable.
From the industrial point of view what are the components of success here besides the obviously good team:
- mission: big, Google-sized mission: revolution of health care by personal genetic information as the source of upcoming personalized medicine
- biotechnology: based on the highest available technology platforms in microarrays (Illumina) (watch out, next gen sequencing is in the corner!)
- capital investment and network effect: I can only repeat myself: 23andMe is probably the most well-connected and backed startup in the history of Silicon Valley.(photo: happy 23andMe founders and early customers)
- information technology the cool and user-friendly factor of the browser based service is really amazing (in the past couple of weeks I demonstrated it to a bunch of people and even those were able to catch the essence of the available information who are older, web-unsavvy)
- simplicity of service: you just spit 2ml into a tube and FedEx it
- most aggressive marketing strategy based largely on the network effect among the power elite of the USA (and consequently, the world)
From the consumer point of view let me tell you 1 personal example of the lifestyle effect of the service: Read the rest of this entry »
I ordered my first commercial genetic profile from 23andMe on the 9th of September online, FedExed my 2 ml saliva from Budapest to 23andMe, Mountain View on the 12th of September. I got the results today. That said within 3 weeks since the birth of the idea I purchased more than 500 000 SNPs of mine analyzed, evaluated and ready to be browsed. With this step I finally and quickly entered into the age of personalized genetics no matter how embryonic it is.
After a superficial first scan of my results I can say that it is a really interesting thing that instantly pushes me towards accumulating more knowledge on the personalized genetics field concerning specific traits, stats, risks and studies.
Here is a first look on what my Y chromosome SNPs are saying on my paternal haplogroup:
I learned for instance that based only on my genotype and not any environmental factors involved I have a lower than average riskRead the rest of this entry »
The Institute for the Future‘s X2 project is all about tracing future trends in science and technology As the steward of the Biomedical Sciences and Biotechnology Group I collect signals in these fields on which some forecasts can be based later on. Here are some issues I found future sensitive enough recently:
It was already known that amongst the Google top people Sergey Brin is the one who is most interested in pushing biotechnology and the biomedical sciences: in his Stanford years he was interested in biology courses according to The Google Story, he married Anne Wojcicki (who graduted from biology at Yale), Google invested $4.4 million into 23andMe the pioneering personal genomics company co-founded by Anne, then Google invested into 23andMe competitor Navigenics too.
Now Sergey Brin added another, serious and personal reason to think that he is really, personally committed to the quick progress in the biomedical sciences: in his new blog – already a bit of an Internet history – called Too he disclosed that using the 23andMe personal genetics service he figured out something worrying about his and his family’s risk of Parkinson disease (his mother and her aunt are being already diagnosed with PD):
“I learned something very important to me — I carry the G2019S mutation and when my mother checked her account, she saw she carries it too. The exact implications of this are not entirely clear. Early studies tend to have small samples with various selection biases. Nonetheless it is clear that I have a markedly higher chance of developing Parkinson’s in my lifetime than the average person. In fact, it is somewhere between 20% to 80% depending on the study and how you measure.
The G2019S mutation is actually the rs34637584 SNP and lies in the gene LRRK2 encoding leucine-rich repeat kinase on chromosome 12. The mutation affects the first codon of the gene and is a guanine (G)-to- adenine (A) substitution resulting known as a missense and leads to a glycine – serine (hence the name) amino acid conversion in the protein product. Here is how the SNP position looks in the 23andMe browser using the sample family, the Mendels.
There is a nice initiative now in Budapest dedicated to the present and future of high technology: a new private university momentarily dubbed as Aquincum Institute of Technology (AIT) will be built near to the Graphisoft Park in Óbuda (Aquincum) concentrating on competitive information-/biotechnology (mainly bioinformatics) education and entrepreneurship.
The main instigator of the project is Gábor Bojár, founder and CEO of the most successful Hungarian software company, Graphisoft.
“The company aims to become the global leader in building-architectural software solutions, hence it must found the training of professionals on a business basis, Bojar said. The new school is to be opened in 2010.”
Mr. Bojár convinced world-class Hungarian scientists and businessmen like Wolf-prize winner discrete mathematician and computer scientist LászlóLovász, inventor and architecture professor Ernő Rubik, former Office guru, intentionalprogrammer and space tourist Simonyi Charles and scale-free network theorist Albert-LászlóBarabási amongst others to back the idea of a profit-oriented technology university sustained by the market itself.
It’s not too hard to recognize some particular Silicon Valley virtues or models behind the idea of an university like AIT let’s just think about the innovative environment at Stanford, intellectual and entrepreneurial home of the HP, Sun Microsystems and Google founders. What I have in mind here concerning the biotechnology part is The California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) which is ‘a cooperative effort between the state of California, the University of California campuses at Berkeley, San Francisco, and Santa Cruz, and industry and venture capital partners’.
As the second operation of building my genetically well informed future yesterday (2 days after completing the order) I collected 2 ml of my saliva with the help of 23andMe’s Oragene DNA self-collection kit manufactured by DNA Genotek. First operation has been the sequencing of the D-loop of my mitochondrial DNA out of 5 ml of saliva in the lab at Tulane as a last control experiment, more on that later.
I’d be curious to know approximately how many people in Hungary or in Central Europe, or in all Europe have already used personalized genetics services like 23andMe or the Iceland based deCODE genetics’ genotyping services. As the whole industry is less than 1 year old (starting November 2007) there are not too many public stats available or at least I haven’t found any. With the recent (8th Sep) announcement of the modest $399 kit price reduced from $999 the pioneering personalized genetics service is now affordable for a lot more people, like me (compare it to the $600 iPhone early adopter fee, which I was unable not to buy). Read the rest of this entry »
If “Science has a really serious marketing problem” as Larry Page observed, then life extension technologies face even bigger marketing problems. I am definitely not a marketing expert but realized the problem early on when thinking about the lag-phase period of a robust life extension technology. So I made a short email interview with Dave Gobel, the marketing and business mind/strategist behind the Methuselah Foundation (official title: Chief Executive Officer) following our meeting and chat at the SENS3 conference in Cambridge, UK, 2007.
1. What is the biggest marketing problem of any future (or present) healthy life extension technology?
The biggest marketing problem today is the time it takes for a beneficial effect to present itself. For instance, a product such as resveratrol may take months to present beneficial results, or it may never show up clinically. People who are scientifically sophisticated can appreciate the value of reduced circulating fats or glucose, but to the typical individual, there are much sexier things to spend money on that give immediate gratification and clear utility. The proof of this is illustrated by a counter example – how ridiculously easy it would be to sell a product that biologically reversed grey hair. The effect might be seen gradually but incontrovertably by all and in the mirror directly.
It seems to me that the best way to proceed from a business standpoint therefore is from the outside in. Create legitimate products that improve a person’s visual image and therefore social standing and they will flock for the result. Try to engineer those products to have globally beneficial effects, and marketing becomes easy.
So, for the present, the problem is delayed, and difficult to pinpoint results in exchange for expensive pills/treatments and never ending taking of pills. What about the future? The problem of marketing will evaporate as tissue engineering provides an immediate benefit by eliminating hip, knee and similar pains while restoring or even improving base functionality. When biologically matched teeth can be implanted and grown anew in gums, marketing will be easy.
2. How to market life extension for different generations (teenagers, college students, young adults, mature adults, grandpas and grandmas) and what are the main differences here?Read the rest of this entry »
Last year I was probably the only SciFoo Camper with an explicit life extension commitment. I suggested & held a session which was related a bit to partial immortalization but was rather about the systems biology perspective in general, illustrated with some examples. So throughout the terrific SciFoo Camp 2007 life extension as a conversation topic remained rather implicit (ok, close to zero) and there was not much room to discuss it in the lack of other fellow life extensionists.
In my opinion the whole point of unconferences is to form the good aggregate of people with a common interest & similar/complementer message to join forces in order to draw enough (intellectual) attention for their topic. In this context, an unconference is about topics at the first place, not just about people. Idea networking is as important as social networking.
And if something fits 100% with the idea of SciFoo it is life extension/aging just as handling terrantic scientific datasets, open science or climate change as all these topics are utterly complicated and quite urgent screaming for the attention of the smartest people.
So I emailed Timo Hannay, SciFoo organizer:
“One thing I’ve noticed is that it would be very good to organize a session on scientific life extension technologies and consequences, because the SciFoo people are ideal to see and discuss all angles of this really important topic.”
The concept of decellularizing complex organs in cadavers and reseeding the remaining matrix structure with differentiated, stem or progenitor cells, growing in a bioreactor and transplanting back to the organism could turn out to be a real technological shortcut in the field of tissue engineering. It is not a brand new story on the web, but it is quite new in science and when I heard Doris Taylor at the Understanding Aging Conference talking on that….well I was really amazed.
Dr. Taylor not only showed the pictures of a complete decellularized rat heart matrix, but in fact they did it on a whole rat framework. So the obvious question is whether the technique could be extended to complete human cadavers (imagine the bone and the bone marrow situation) and if yes, when and how? I am sure if there were a useful clinical near term application of this type of tissue engineering, people would include that option too into their testaments.
And now a pop video on the topic and the abstract:
What we do:
Halcyon Molecular is developing an ultra-low-cost DNA sequencing technology. Our single molecule approach does not require PCR amplification and will allow for megabase read lengths with simultaneous determination of methylation pattern. We aim to sequence entire human genomes de novo for well under the “holy grail” cost-to-consumer of $1000.
I argued many times here that biology based biotechnology is the next information technology but in order to do so, biotech should harness good IT patterns and mimic its massive computing practices to handle the enormous amount of constantly accumulating data. Often this trend could be summarized in a simple way: keep your eye on Google and conduct thought experiments in advance in which science is done in a Googleplex like environment in terms of the computing & financial resources and algorithm heavy engineering culture. Use Python and learn cluster computing and MapReduce. With the expected launch of the massive scientific dataset hosting Google service – nicknamed Palimpsest – this year finally a direct interface between scientists and Googlers emerges and hopefully opens up possibilities for scientists to cooperate with Google. (Remember my joke on Google BioLabs back in 2006)? I get emails from biologists, bioinformaticians asking me how to be hired by Google ever since then. As I tweeted yesterday: I growingly have the impression that “being ambitious” today = ‘worked, is currently working, is going to work at/for Google’ Taking Google’s inter-industrial power into consideration I see a real chance that some day the “Google of Biotechnology” title goes not to a startup yet to be emerged, not to Genentech or to 23andMe but……to Google itself. No kidding here. Fortunately Google’s model is “to build a killer app then monetize it later” says Andy Rubin, the man behind Google’s Android mobile software in the July issue of Wired so scientists working for the big G probably won’t have to worry about turning their scientific killer app into an instant cash machine.
And now in the very issue of Wired magazine (not online yet ) there is an exciting cover story on the same pattern I talked about concerning the life sciences but in the broader context of every kind of science with the provocative, Fukuyama-like title The End of Science. There is a witty and short essay from editor-in-chief Chris Anderson entitled The End of Theory followed by examples of the ‘new science’ like the The Large Hadron Collider expected to generate 10 petabytes if data/second, The Sloan Digital Sky Survey heaven catalog maker accumulating 25 terrabytes of data so far, the skeleton scanning project of Sharmila Majumdar and the Many Eyes project “where users can share their own dynamic, interactive representations of big data”.
For many people around the globe, Chris Anderson is a freeconomist & the author of a popular airport book but fewer people are aware that he was actually trained as a (quantum) physicist and even worked at Los Alamos Read the rest of this entry »
Even tech people in Silicon Valley need to join their powerful forces and sources when it is about aging related neurodegenerative diseases and help research and the clinic.
It’s my first real encounter with a situation in which the officials of the state of California are clearly against innovation for financial reasons obvious enough (is enough):
Wired.com has obtained a copy of the cease-and-desist letter sent to Navigenics by the state of California’s Public Health Department from a company spokesperson.
The letter’s strongest wording is reserved for another section of the law, Business and Professions Code Section 1288, which requires a doctor’s note for all laboratory tests, unless, like pregnancy tests, they are exempt from that law.
“Genetic tests are NOT exempt,” the letter reads. “As such, the test must be ordered by a physician or surgeon.”Read the rest of this entry »
It’s official: The California Department of Public Health wants practicing physicians (many of them prehistorically, sorry, traditionally trained) to be the patres familias in issues between personal genetic test takers and direct-to-consumer personal genetic testing start-ups while declining the test takers’ right to get familiar with their own genetic makeup and risks by their own. Calif. cracks down on 13 genetic testing startups
California health regulators have demanded that 13 direct-to-consumer genetic testing startups halt sales in the state until they prove they meet state standards. All the companies have two weeks to demonstrate to regulators that their laboratories are certified by the state and federal governments, said department spokeswoman Lea Brooks. The startups also must show the tests they are selling California residents have been ordered by a doctor as required by state law.
The “Understanding Aging: Biomedical and Bioengineering Approaches”conference will be held from June 27-29, 2008 at UCLA organized by Aubrey de Grey, Irina Conboy and Amy Wagers. I like to call it UndertsEnding Aging in myself and I am excited to go to LA and meet new people also people from SENS3.
Yesterday I created a FriendFeed room for the conference as it seems to be a perfect place of live microblogging the conference, sharing any kind of links, videos, comments, feeds and feedbacks. Working on aging and the postponement of it (you can bravely say life extension) is always a pioneering work so it’s time to use pioneering web apps for that purpose, just like FriendFeed.
Aubrey de Grey, Kevin Perrott and Kevin Dewalt have already joined the room. What about you? See you on FriendFeed, see you on LA!
The Wall Street Journal Patent Board Biotechnology Scorecard was published this week in which biotech companies & private research firms are grouped by their Patent Board science strength ranking “which is based on the scale, quality, impact, and nearness to core science of a company’s patent-based intellectual property”.
What I found interesting at the first sight is Geron‘s nice position and the lack of Genentech. Also take a look on the charts and compare, say Illumina and Affymetrix or the research intensity/innovation cycle ratio in case of the same company.
Says my source, San Diego biased marketing expert Rick Cook in an in medias res email:
“Three of the top 10 science-based researchers, according to the rankings, are based in San Diego. Several other San Diego companies fall outside the top 10. Nanogen, one of my clients, made the rankings. What’s particularly interesting about Nanogen — who competes against #1-ranked Roche — is that the company has by far the lowest market cap (just over $28 million) represented in the rankings. In fact, if you divide patents issued by market cap, which could be used as a proxy for size, Nanogen ranks number one — dollar-for-dollar the most innovative company on the list.”
I would like to provide you with a copy of the press release to be distributed via press release distribution sites on Wednesday. We will also put it on our site within a few hours after this email so you can confirm its authenticity. Please help us distribute this press release.
The Biogerontology Research Foundation, which has been started with the help of worlds’ most prominent scientists and businessmen received the charitable status from the Charity Commission for England and Wales.
The fact, which is not mentioned in the press release is that the chief scientific officer of the foundation is Dr. Michael Rose of UCI, who is famous for extending life of fruit flies threefold.Read the rest of this entry »
Also a good presentation by Linda Avey, other co-founder, for instance on data privacy and service security:“We take the security of our customers’ data to the highest degree…you guys (Googlers) are very much of the same mind..One of our leading engineers is probably the most paranoid man we’ve ever meet and he is the perfect guy for that.
Here are my screenshots on the genetic puzzle on the Google triumvirate presented by Anne Wojcicki:
When I wrote about BioBarCamp for the first time, it was just an idea to organize an unconference for biogeeks, people interested in life scientists around SciFoo Camp time.
Sometimes in looking forward it’s good to look back. In cardiac regenerative medicine, probably the only clear success to date is heart transplantation. From the initial grant that Norman Shumway received in 1958 [to study the possibility of heart transplantation] it took more than two decades before the procedure became routine.
Shumway was a careful, thoughtful man. He not only didn’t do the first heart transplant; he didn’t do the second. He was slowed down in the United States because of the regulatory barriers and ethical concerns. Christiaan Barnard, on the other hand, went back to South Africa and decided to just go for it. Sounds familiar?
We realized very quickly that this was not working, that the science was not there. In 1968, a year after his first attempt, Barnard gave up on the procedure and considered it a failure. Everyone gave up, except Shumway. He went back to the lab and spent the next ten years figuring it out. He realized that the issue was rejection.Read the rest of this entry »
As of this moment the population of The Life Scientists Room on FriendFeed is 73. See the BioGang in motion and get an initial statistics on the distribution of wet lab/dry lab, academic/industrial people there. Here are the first 8 answerers out of the 16 so far.
“This paper outlines prospects for applying the emerging techniques of synthetic biology to the field of anatomy, with the aim of programming cells to organize themselves into specific, novel arrangements, structures and tissues. There are two main reasons why developing this hybrid discipline – synthetic morphology – would be useful. The first is that having a way to engineer self-constructing assemblies of cells would provide a powerful means of tissue engineering for clinical use in surgery and regenerative medicine. The second is that construction of simple novel systems according to theories of morphogenesis gained from study of real embryos will provide a means of testing those theories rigorously, something that is very difficult to do by manipulation of complex embryos. This paper sets out the engineering requirements for synthetic morphology, which include the development of a library of sensor modules, regulatory modules and effector modules that can be connected functionally within cells. A substantial number of sensor and regulatory modules already exist and this paper argues that some potential effector modules have already been identified. The necessary library may therefore be within reach. The paper ends by suggesting a set of challenges, ranging from simple to complex, the achievement of which would provide valuable proofs of concept.”
Consumer-Enabled Research, the second goal of pioneering personalized genetics company 23andMe, reached its first generation with the launch of 23andWe.
“23andWe marks a new approach to genetics research. By directly involving 23andMe customers in the company’s research projects, the goal is to conduct large-scale studies powered by a web-based community of diverse individuals who are willing to share information (on a confidential basis) about their health and other personal traits.”
The O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures Startup Camp is a nice option for the emerging personalized genomics companies or any web-related biotech startups to communicate and cooperate with alpha geeks and early technology adopters.
The Thursday and Friday (July 10-11) before this year’s Foo Camp in Sebastopol July 11-13, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures will be hosting OATV Startup Camp. This startup boot camp will consist of sessions led by startup veterans and other experts in a roundtable discussion format on various topics important to founders. The sessions will be more of a conversation on each topic rather than a lecture, in which participants will learn from each other as well as from entrepreneurs who’ve already been successful.Read the rest of this entry »
Nature Biotechnology is the (peer review) journal for me: it’s geeky, fresh and it takes into account more than just one point-of-view, that of the scientist-academist’s: technology & business are hand in hands also. (Recommending Nat Biotech makes a niche sense here while recommending Nature, which is actually the only science journal I’m reading issue by issue is hm… too obvious)
But Nature Biotech goes as far as citing even a non peer review journal – I am also prettyfamiliar with – called Wired. So my puzzle is /please use your contextual knowledge first & just then your typing skills while thinking of an answer/: which Wired article is cited in a March Nature Biotech News and Views article (very good, by the way) named Synthetic genomes brought closer to life by Robert A Holt amongst strict science articles. Don’t think too high, it’s rather a reflection.
With the public launch of the X2 project, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang realized one of his dreams. Alex is the research director of The Institute for the Future (IFTF), an independent nonprofit research group headquartered in Palo Alto, Silicon Valley. He writes:
The project is called X2, and its aim is to forecast the future of science, technology and innovation. The name may sound like science fiction, but it’s actually an historical allusion. In my previous life as an academic historian, I studied the X Club, a group of Victorian scientists who were very interested in the future of British science. The Club formed when its members were still young, ambitious outsiders, fighting to establish their reputations in a world in which social connections and privilege mattered more than scientific achievement; by the time they retired, its nine members were among the leaders of British science.
It seems that my favorite ever unconference, the SciFooCamp will be aroundunconferenced by a BioBarCamp this year. The whole idea of the BioBarCamp is based upon the SciFoo Camp, so it is by no means a competitive but a complimentary event.
From the BarCamp wiki: “The BioBarCamp is an idea (fed by the tweets of the BioTwitterer community) to organize a life sciences – biotechnology – personalized genomics & medicine – bioinformatics unconference at the Bay Area around the 3rd SciFoo Camp time, which is 8-10th August. The SciFooCamp generates a lot of enthusiasm & activity but not just for those who are invited (only 200). On the other hand, it would be nice to organize a bio-related BarCamp, just like the Cambridge BarCamb, in which the bio-related SciFoo Campers and all the other biogeeks could gather together.”
The main activity is happening right now at the public BioBarCamp Google Group. If interested please join there or just follow the discussions. We are right now in the process of finding a proper venue and sponsors and any help would be most welcome. Right now 6 or 7 August seems to be the consensus day and we have a very generous offer from The Institute for the Future via Alex Soojung-Kim Pang in Palo Alto (no response from 23andMe so far, see below).
It’s against a classic Twitter story, just like this before. You can reconstruct the whole conversation with Twitter Search Engine Tweet Scan by searching for terms SciFoo, BioBarCamp, SciBarCamp but here are my selected tweets:
Scene One, 04/10/08 How the idea was born on that day in reverse chronological order:
Scene Two 04/22/08 How the biospecificity and name was born alongside with a possible venue idea: Read the rest of this entry »
In 2007, Google made headlines when they invested $4.4 million in 23andMe, a genetic screening start-up company began by Anne Wojcicki, the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and a business partner. But if you thought that was Google’s only interest in genetics and DNA, you’re wrong. Google has also been investing in a second DNA start-up called Navigenics, which for $2,500 and a small bit of saliva will provide you with genetic test results delivered securely online containing information about the likelihood for 18 medical conditions.
What’s really funny here is that I predicted this investment last Friday, on the 18th, on Twitter. The original idea was Aaron Swartz’s Google thought experiment: Imagine you were suddenly put in charge of Google. What would you spend your time doing?I came up with this answer (picking Navigenics because of ther profile and location) on behalf of Sergey Brin:
“tracks the web technology ecosystem commonly referenced as “Web 2.0.” We collect facts and figures about new web products, startup companies, key startup employees, and the funding dollars powering their growth.”
3. 23andMe is a pioneering web-based, personalized genomics startup (founded in April, 2006) with a high-tech service, a definitely “Web 2.0″ website & investors most Web 2.0 startups only dreaming of.
There is a pattern of successful technological innovations I can summarize the following way: there is a nerd engineer who actually invents something and builds the first functional prototype, and there is a geeky enough yo who recognizes the value of the prototype and makes the bigger money/fame/other beneficiaries out of it by turning it into a commercial product: the archetypal nerd/geek pair in this respect is Wozniak/Jobs. In case of the wiki software the programmer/inventor was WardCunningham, while Jimmy Wales became the official Mr. Wiki due to Wikipedia.
Recently I discovered Cunningham on Twitter and I learnt that for coding he takes inspiration from life’s processes ranging from cell signaling to cultural evolution. His coming speech: Read the rest of this entry »
In the 2007 proof-of-concept paper, entitled A Pocket-Sized Convective PCR Thermocycler, authors Nitin Agrawal, Yassin A. Hassan, and Victor M. Ugaz wrote:
