Aging-centric genetic health database in California: 100k people, ~65yrs, 700k SNPs, telomeres too

Kaiser Permanente alongside with UCSF plans for genetic analyses of an unprecedented 100,000 older Californians, the Technology Review writes in Massive Gene Database Planned in California

The effort will make use of existing saliva samples taken from California patients, whose average age is 65. Their DNA will be analyzed for 700,000 genetic variations called single-nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs, using array analysis technology from Affymetrix. Through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the resulting information will be available to other researchers, along with a trove of patient data including patients’ Kaiser Permanente electronic health records, information about the air and water quality in their neighborhoods, and surveys about their lifestyles.

The target age group shows that the focus is on “secondary aging”:

Given the high average age of the group, the platform will also be a boon to studying diseases of aging. “One might want to ask,” Schaefer says, “what are the genetic influences on changes in blood pressure as people age, and how are those changes in blood pressure related to diseases of aging, like stroke and Alzheimer’s and other cardiovascular diseases?”

UCSF will perform separate procedures on the samples to determine the length of telomeres–sections of DNA at the ends of chromosomes that protect against damage. The length of telomeres is associated with cell division and aging. One of the coinvestigators on the project is Elizabeth Blackburn, a biologist at UCSF who shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine for her work on telomeres.

Mountain View – Budapest: 20 days to get my 23andMe profile!

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 risk

Understanding Aging Conference is over but it is the end of the beginning

I try to cover some interesting, sciencey points on the conference in later posts, right now just a brief, subjective human- and strategy focused summary:

Congrats to Aubrey de Grey and the team, everything went well and if finally a worldwide consensus is around the corner claiming that robust healthy lifespan extension is technologically possible and worth achieving it is largely due to Aubrey’s relentless networking, organizing activity and American like pushy marketing strategy! Well done!

Had a nice chat with a diverse bunch of interesting people amongst others: Barbara Logan, Nason Schooler, Todd Huffman, Betty Liu, the startupper Andregg brothers, Mark Hamalainen, Keith Causey, Ben Zealley, Brian Martin and sure I forget to mention many more here.

In the photo (thanks Barbara Logan): Neal Van De Ree, Florida auctioneer and activist, John Furber, Legendary Pharmaceuticals, Florida, Aubrey, Paul Logan, Alex Zhavoronkov, GTCBio, BioGerontology Research Foundation Damian Crowe, Genescient, BioGerontology Research Foundation and yours truly.

Conference photo via Bruce Klein:

Aubrey de Grey on Aging 2008, the disease, the cure and the implications

This is how my Macbook saw Aubrey de Grey’s talk exactly 1 week ago on the AGING preconference at UCLA.

Innovation stop: “All they’ve done is created an extra billing event for the doctor”

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 Science, Alexis Madrigal, upcoming BioBarCamper:

Exclusive: DNA Tester Reveals Cease-and-Desist Letter

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.”

Future stop: California health officials against personal genetics risk-takers

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.

I give you trusted links instead of complicating your day with my own opinion:

CT and PET body scans on the iPhone by MIMvista at WWDC

MIMvista Corp. is a third party software provider for PET and PET/CT display. Go SciPhone, go! source: Gizmodo Live Coverage

23andWe follows 23andMe: First generation of Consumer-Enabled Research

Consumer-Enabled Research, the second goal of pioneering personalized genetics company 23andMe, reached its first generation with the launch of 23andWe.

From BusinessWire:

“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.”

video via Deepak

As Esther Dyson’s said on The Spittoon blog, which is the corporate blog of 23andMe: What You Can Do for 23andMe (and Future Generations)

O’Reilly Startup Camp for geeky biotech startups too!

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.

Tim O’Reilly writes:

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.

What is Genentech CEO Art Levinson doing for biotech as a Google board member?

The title question is my million (not billion yet) dollar question for this year. Arthur Levinson is a board member of Google (Apple too) and in his leftover time he is the CEO of the most successful biotech company so far, that’s Genentech. I would be curious to hear about his biotech-related activity as a G board member from my readers even in the form of guesses. Maybe he is teaching biotech classes to Googlers after both Genentech’s and Google’s investment into 23andMe or just sitting around sometimes at the nice cafeterias at the Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View and explaining knockout technology to coders.

Biotechies at O’Reilly ETech, March 3 – 6, San Diego

The O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (ETech) is on and this year they had a growing number of biotech related sessions. Fellow SciFoo Campers like Hugh Rienhoff and Timo Hannay, Makers like Phil Torrone and Limor Fried, Brain Hackers like Ed Boyden are visiting and many more.

Understanding Aging Conference in L.A.: de Grey, Conboy, Wagers and many others…

Looks like the scientist coalition behind healthy life extension is widening. In line with that the question Why was life extension ruled out of the 14 Grand Engineering Challenges? is fading away.

Here is an Aubrey de Grey message from my mailbox:

All details, including forms for abstract submission and
online registration, are at the conference website:

http://www.mfoundation.org/UABBA/

The preliminary program already has over two dozen confirmed
speakers, all of them world leaders in their field. As for previous
conferences I have [co-]organised, the emphasis of this meeting is on
“applied biogerontology” — the design and implementation of
biomedical interventions that may, jointly, constitute a
comprehensive panel of rejuvenation therapies, sufficient to restore
middle-aged or older laboratory animals (and, in due course, humans)
to a youthful degree of physiological robustness. The list of
scientific sessions and confirmed speakers is as follows:

DNA damage, telomeres, cancer
Adam Arkin, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Jan Vijg, Buck
Institute for Age Research; Jerry Shay, U. Texas Southwestern;
Claudia Gravekamp, Pacific Medical Center Research Institute; Zheng
Cui, Wake Forest University School of Medicine; Rita Effros, UCLA

The cell niche
Irina Conboy, U. California Berkeley; Judith Campisi, Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory and Buck Institute; Leanne Jones, Salk
Institute; Ken Muneoka, Tulane University; Kevin Healy, Stanford
University

Bubble City’s South Park: geek tourism

Finally back from my Bay Area trip, the workshop I participated turned out to be very stimulating in terms of people and ideas. Also visiting The Blood Knot performance at the American Conservatory Theater and having a drink with Monya&Dan were absolutely delightful. I missed my flight on Saturday, so I slept in LA (and missed my wife) and discovered the city to the amount of a Taco Bell dinner near to the La Quinta Hotel. Also I did a little geek tourism and visited the South Park area in San Francisco (but forgot to check the Wired headquarters) which was so nicely described in Aaron Swartz‘s unfortunately unfinished (but not unfinishable) Bubble city:

Downtown San Francisco is a world of carefully-gridded streets and looming skyscrapers, but hidden behind a gas station on Third is a place that almost looks like another world. The sun shines brightly upon a park with green grass and tall shady trees and vibrant swings with children. The park is an oval and the perimeter is lined with small, pastel-colored buildings. Here and there are a smattering of small cafes and restaurants. And the other buildings are filled with startups. Twitter here. Adaptive Path there. Even Yahoo, when it wanted to encourage its employees to be more startup-y, opened up an office in the neighborhood. Sit on the grass and chances are you’ll sit near a friend from another company or bump into them in line at a cafe. The place crawls with companies and back on the street, surveying the scene with a distant but watchful eye, lie the journalists, whose publications cover with awe the rumblings of those below. It was here that Newsflip made its home.

Off to Palo Alto, CA

Leaving New Orleans for the Bay Area for the next 3 days. I am visiting a quite enigmatic workshop in Palo Alto on Feb 22, then I am in San Francisco downtown on Friday evening and Saturday AM. If anybody would like to meet me, I am available there on Saturday near Union Square, just drop a mail.

Travel readings: Wired, March (not online yet, The Ruby on Rails coverage was interesting, but still hesitating whether to read Chris Anderson next airport book ad essay: Free or not, but definitely will read Joshua Davis story on Cougar Ace), Woody Guthrie: Bound for glory

Also a Wired recommendation: How to fly through the airport security in a dignity safe way: laceless shoes and holeless socks.

TED, February 27-March 1, 2008, Monterey: Anything unheard before?

The Spittoon: the eminent corporate blog of 23andMe and Consumer Enabled Research

The personal genomics service 23andMe just launched publicly a corporate blog called The Spittoon that has been internally up for a few weeks. It is a new chapter in biotech corporate blogging. Just like the web page of 23andMe, The Spittoon’s WordPress blog platform, the concept and design is excellent: amongst others you can find scientific blog posts written by Matt Crenson science writer and posts written by founders Linda Avey and Anne Wojcicki in the name of radical transparency. As Wired fellow Clive Thompson wrote:

Radical forms of transparency are now the norm at startups – and even some Fortune 500 companies. It is a strange and abrupt reversal of corporate values. Not long ago, the only public statements a company ever made were professionally written press releases and the rare, stage-managed speech by the CEO. Now firms spill information in torrents, posting internal memos and strategy goals, letting everyone from the top dog to shop-floor workers blog publicly about what their firm is doing right – and wrong. Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO of Sun Microsystems, dishes company dirt and apologizes to startups he’s accidentally screwed. Venture capitalists now demand that CEOs be fluent in blogspeak.

Radical transparency could be standard in the case of Silicon Valley tech startups but in the Biotech Industry the standards are light years away from that. For instance the 23andMe research team communicates publicly on the biparental inheritance of mitochondrial DNA which is a sensitive issue concerning their genealogy service. The reason why Spittoon is so web-friendly and uptodate and is in fact a paradigm corporate blog for every other biotech company in the future is its web-based business model and Google-like corporate culture thanks to its networking background.

For instance, Anne Wojcicki co-founder introduces the concept of Consumer Enabled Research in her introductory blog post The Power of We:

Our goal at 23andMe is to enable individuals to form communities around shared interests and to empower those communities to be actively involved with research. We call it Consumer Enabled Research. We don’t just want communities to have a voice, we want to provide a platform for them to collectively aggregate their genetic information. One of the significant bottlenecks in research is the lack of data. Researchers and physicians rarely have enough of it to really understand a disease or how to treat it. Our goal is to change that.

After registration readers can make comments and I strongly hope that the comment system will not be shut down (just like in the past at BoingBoing), but for that commenters should be on-topic and moderate. I’ve just commented Wojcicki’s post, but I’d like to share it with you here too:

CIRM and NIH stem cell grants to the biotech industry

Different attitudes, same endeavors.

1. The folks at the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) started to offer grants for biotech companies up to $55,000 out of the 3 billion ‘hope’ dollars.

San Diego Union Tribune: Industry and academia team up:

For the first time in its three-year existence, the state taxpayer-funded stem cell institute is offering grant money to biotechnology companies….The stem cell institute wants to issue up to 20 planning grants to allow prospective disease-team members to hold teleconferences and travel to meetings around the state with potential collaborators to work out the details of how their group would function.

The idea is to form a team whose members have expertise in all areas of developing a drug or diagnostic – from the initial idea to testing it on animal models, producing enough of it for experiments and figuring out how it meets the needs of patients.

2. On the other hand, the NIH people in Bethesda, Maryland like the West and East Coast United Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) but not because the company’s single cell biopsy method for creating ethical ES cells.

Reuters: Advanced Cell Technology Awarded Grant from the NIH

California embryonic stem cell dollars: beyond the embryonic phase

According to the newest Request For Applications (RFA) of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), the New Cell Line Awards will support two categories of research:

Category 1: Derivation of new hESC lines using excess or rejected early stage human
embryos generated by in vitro fertilization.

Category 2: Derivation of pluripotent human stem cell lines from other sources using
alternative methods such as (but not limited to) SCNT or reprogramming of neonatal or
adult cells (iPS cells).

The real news is encoded in category 2: from now on even adult stem cell research can be backed by California Embryonic Stem Cell Dollars. The same idea in another form in the text:

• disease-specific or otherwise genetically diverse, pluripotent stem cell lines to support
studying the effects of genetic variation on disease mechanism and response to
treatment, and the discovery and evaluation of new drug candidates
• the discovery and implementation of alternative methods for generating pluripotent
human stem cells, including technology leading to the generation of patient-matched or
disease-specific cell lines

What research trend is behind? The generation of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. The successful reprogramming of differentiated human somatic cells into a pluripotent, embryonic stem (ES) cell-like state that would allow creation of patient- and disease-specific stem cells instead of using controversial embryonic stem cells was recently reported by 2 groups of researchers: the Yamanaka and the Thomson lab.

Under this RFA, CIRM intends to commit up to $25 million to support up to 16 awards,
eight (8) in each of the two categories of research. CIRM proposes to fund each award
for up to three (3) years for direct project costs of up to $300,000 per year.

Other side of the story in California Stem Cell Report: California’s Widening Stem Cell Net

The new faces of Silicon Valley: biotech-savvy co-founders Avey-Wojcicki

After Jobs-Wozniak, Yang-Filo, Brin-Page, it’s time to memorize the names of the co-founders of 23andMe, the first personalized genome service, who are turning the tech establishment into a biotech mode.

The new faces of Silicon Valley: the age of Blue Jeans/Black T-Shirt co-founder computer nerds is over, welcome to the era of stylish, well-dressed genetics-savvy co-founder business ladies! According to the about page of 23andMe:

Linda Avey has over 20 years of sales and business development experience in the biopharmaceutical industry while the other founder, Anne Wojcicki brings to 23andMe a 10-year background in healthcare investing, focused primarily on biotechnology companies.

23andMe is probably the most well-connected startup in the history of Silicon Valley with an unlimited amount of networking and server capabilities thanks to Wojcicki and board member Esther Dyson.

Spit a big in a tube, search with Genome Explorer: the 23andMe way

Detailed article in the New York Times on the early experience of decoding the genetic code and interpreting the customers’ DNA via the service of 23andMe. The buzz name of the project: personalized genetics/genomics. Although other companies are mentioned briefly, the focus is clearly on 23andMe. The basics: get rid of a thousand bucks (sorry, just $999 per person) by build your order online, spit a big (2.5 mls) in a plastic tube in the postal delivered Saliva Kit, FedEx your saliva back to Mountain View (plus shipping and handling cost), wait a couple of weeks for an email and then use the company’s in-built Genome Explorer to find out the surprising details of your genetic makeup online.

From the NYT article: I soon found that I might well be sight impaired during those extra years. According to the five SNPs for macular degeneration I fed into the “Genome Explorer,” I was nearly 100 times more likely to develop the disease than someone with the most favorable A-C-G-T combination.

Other links:

Wired by Thomas Goetz: 23AndMe Will Decode Your DNA for $1,000. Welcome to the Age of Genomics

bbgm by Deepak: Your personal health: Consumer genomics becomes reality

Scienceroll by Berci Meskó: Personalized Genetics: Still Rising

United State of California: buy bonds in stem cell research

In the unique state of California there is now an offer for individuals to place orders from October 3 during a $250 million sale of state debt to fund embryonic stem-cell research. The minimum bet is $5,000 and over 1 million you need special permission (just like buying more than 2 iPhones in the early days). That is unique. But wait…

“Of the $250 million issuance, $200 million will fund stem cell research and roughly $45 million will cover the cost of issuing the debt and retiring bond anticipation notes sold while the stem-cell measure was being contested in court.”

Links:

Reuters: Individuals get first dibs on Calif. stem-cell debt

California State Treasurer

California Stem Cell Report: Attention Stem ‘Cellists:’ Buy Your Bonds Now

SciFood aesthetics at the Googleplex

Let’s emphasize the role of good food in efficient brainstormings (just like SciFoo was) now and ever. Bad feelings were simply excluded about the food at the Googleplex. I shot these pictures with myPhone. Thanks, chef!

Ask a good scientist in a San Francisco Cafe: The Reality of Age Research

The Buck Institute in Novato, California is a rich private research center focusing on aging with the mission of “extending the healthy years of life”. They have a real interdisciplinary staff, exactly the one that is needed for studying aging, which is a notoriously multifactorial, multicausal, atypical and complex biological phenomenon.
One of the faculty member of Buck Institute is Gordon J. Lithgow Associate Professor, and on Tuesday due to Monya Baker‘s alarm I was happy to participate on Lithgow’s clearly terrific presentation without slides but full with thoughts, facts and good comments from a grateful audience. The event was part of the Ask a Scientist Series, which is a monthly lecture series, held at a San Francisco cafe. This time the place was the Axis Cafe and here are some words out of the official intro: Understanding and dealing with disease associated with aging is arguably the greatest challenge for biomedicine in the 21st Century. In fact growing old is the single largest risk factor for human disease in developed countries. Unfortunately, we don’t know much about the biological basis of aging — but a series of remarkable discoveries in simple animal models indicates that our understanding of the subject is beginning to change. For example, it is now commonplace to extend the lifespan of lab worms and flies by genetic or chemical interventions. Come learn about the latest in the new field of geroscience and talk about opportunities for living better, more productive lives.

On the iPhone photo made by me: Mr. Lithgow is demonstrating the role of chaperone proteins in protein folding/unfolding with 2 paper glasses.

Here are my brief notes and highlights:

All forms of stress is involved in aging not just oxidative stress

SciFoo Camp, 2007: data (Google) publishing (Nature) geeks (O’Reilly)

SciFoo is over, and I’ve just arrived back to New Orleans from SF. First of all: a big thanks for the organizers (Chris DiBona, Timo Hannay, Tim O’Reilly, Google, Nature, O’Reilly) and campers, it was really the highest end. Here is a quick SciFoo key terms summary (photos, detailed accounts later):

“scientific data”

One of the most frequently used key term was “scientific data”. And the question is: how to collect, upload, organize and index them. With the exponentially increasing data sets, that are produced by scientists worldwide, it is obvious that we need really powerful tools to benefit them. After a couple of beta years it is highly probable that Google (according to its mission statement) will offer new ways to manage the enormous amount of valuable scientific data. Without that, the efficiency of the science industry will dramatically decline.

“science publishing”

Yes, the old question ranging from open access science to different pre- and post publishing opportunities, addressing peer-review tools. A new and clear vocabulary is needed. Nature people were honest about the problems, asking for the optimal solutions.

“the geek factor”

Mainstream scientists are rather conservative folks, they can easily have revolutionary thoughts in their niche research fields, but are not too open minded and experimental when it is about new web and technology tools. The alpha geeks from the O’Reilly Media reminded the science population of the SciFoo (not the typical technology neutral mainstream scientists) that there are many innovative things that could be done in and out of science too. (You don’t necessarily need the newest Mac gadgets for that, just try out some mind performance hacks)

Going to San Francisco and the Valley, SciFoo preparations

SciFoo is coming, so I take my flight tomorrow from humid and subtropical New Orleans (running experiment terminated this afternoon, things in liquid nitrogen for downstream processing) to the cold San Francisco. Besides the Googleplex I am visiting Berkeley, Stanford, UCSF and as many of the central places of high tech culture (you know, the cooperating IT and BT interests) as possible. I become a sci-tech tourist for one week. Preparation for SciFoo equals to extending the Google Maps list, inforich contact list and PDFs on the iPhone. It is a constant joy to scan the list of the 200 or so campers (read science foo camp(fire) and meditating on the session suggestions.

See you there. Wednesday, around 4 PM, at the corner of Haight and Ashbury?

Online political marketing with embryonic stem cells

I’ve just realized that Mr. Governator’s official website is the most visible outbound link on the website of The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. That is actually a 3 billion dollar link.

google.stanford.edu circa 1997: a little slide

This slide comes from the presentation of Google Fellow Jeff Dean on Seattle Conference on Scalability, entitled Abstractions for Handling Large Datasets. (The title Google Fellow seems to me as something similar in rank to a full professorship at Stanford.)

Here is the presentation itself embedded:

Abnormal whole body regeneration from the vasculature at the sea squirt

The sea squirt can regenerate its whole body from the vasculature. I asked Ayelet Voskoboynik, postdoctoral fellow from the Weissman lab, Stanford University, to tell us how. Their findings were published in a recent paper, entitled Striving for normality: whole body regeneration through a series of abnormal generations
(FASEB Journal, 2007 May;21(7):1335-44.)

Read the whole interview at The Niche blog of Nature Stem Cell Reports.

Image source: the FASEB Journal, thanks to Cody Mooneyhan.

Who will be the new blogger behind Business 2.0′s BioTech(nically)?

Earlier: BioTech(nically), Business 2.0’s new biotech blog

Aubrey de Grey’s Google TechTalk on Prospects for extending healthy life – a lot

Aubrey de Grey‘s presentation in Google Tech Talk series at the Googleplex, Mountain View, May 29, 2007 (Thanks, Russell Whitaker).

More on Aubrey on Pimm:

Content of Ending Aging, Aubrey de Grey’s coming life extension book

3 Edmonton Aging (Life Extension) Symposium videos

Blogterview with Aubrey de Grey: life extension stories

On CIRM’s Medical and Ethical Standards in Plos Medicine

Geoffrey P. Lomax, Zach W. Hall, Bernard Lo: Responsible Oversight of Human Stem Cell Research: The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine’s Medical and Ethical Standards

Source: Plos blog, In the May issue of PLoS Medicine

Jobs/Gates on the history, Jobs/other guys on the future of digital revolution

News: “Both Jobs and Gates are slated to jointly discuss the digital revolution’s history and future at The Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference on Wednesday.”

Comment: Instead of Mr. Gates I’d be eager to see those 2 guys on the right discussing the future of all things digital (especially the future of biotech and biodata) jointly with Jobs on the same stage.

Illustration: Pablo Lobato‘s work for Wired.

More on the Jobs/Gates gathering: Jobs & Gates, the Biggest Reunion Since Simon & Garfunkel

Second Annual Maker Faire this weekend and expecting the First BioMaker Faire…

Builders, Hackers, Do-It-Yourselfers are gathering around this weekend at the most visible embodiment of the Maker spirit, the Maker Faire 2007 at San Mateo Fairgrounds, California. I remember the inquisitive and incredulous eyes of the traditional tech makers, coders, engineers while presenting my placental stem cell project at Euro Maker Faire last year. Now imagine a similar Faire for Biotech DIYers with open lab spaces… If you can imagine it, you can make it! Links: Make Blog, Phillip Torrone‘s Flickr Stream, Maker Social Network, Wired.

Stem Cell Cup: California Embryonics vs Massachusetts Oldies: $3 vs $1.25 Billion

While people in California can think they are in the centre of the (embryonic) stem cell universe due to Proposition 71′s $3 Billion and the invasion of good scientists into the West Coast, Massachusetts academic and biotech people also are thinking along those lines, so state officials quickly set up a $1.25 Billion package for funding stem cell research in the very state and “establishing the first stem cell bank, a repository of all the stem cell lines created in Massachusetts laboratories, which would serve as a kind of stem cell lending library to scientists around the world. “

Links:

Massachusetts floats $1 bln stem cell research plan (Reuters)

Massachusetts Proposes Stem Cell Research Grants (New York Times)

Bodyhack’s merging with Wired Science Blog

Bodyhack, Wired’s pioneer biotech and stem cell focused blog is folding into Wired Science Blog. Thank you Kristen et al.

The bodyhacknorati profile:

Competitive strength of California Institutions measured by stem cell grants

Press Release of California Institute of Regenerative Medicine: LOS ANGELES, March 16, 2007 – “Just a month after approving nearly $45 million for embryonic stem cell research, California’s stem cell agency authorized another $75.7 million in additional funds for established scientists at 12 non-profit and academic institutions.”

With this latest round of CIRM donation more than $158 million has been approved for research grants at 23 California institutions. From this table below (from the press release) we can guess the competitive strengths of the universities and research institutes:

Artifacts from the past: Wiredophilia

Once upon a time in 2005 I wrote an article on Wired magazine published in a language you probably do not understand. This photo was shot by Daniel Nemeth in my appartment, so if you are curious, you can see three little pieces of carpet in my living room. Have a nice weekend!

Bodyhack redesigned

Bodyhack, Wired’s stem cell focused biotech group blog, written at least by Kristen Philipkoski, Brandon Keim, Randy Dotinga, Mark Woodman and Scott Carney, has got a new dress:

In recent weeks Bodyhack has paid more attention to other Wired blogs and sexuality as well, so content can go through a radical change too. I hope stem cells will remain on the top. Here are some categories with post numbers in brackets:

• Life Extension (11)
• Sexuality (33)
• Stem Cells (221)
• Surgery (25)

80 year old Lokey’s $33 million donation for Stanford Stem Cell Labs

Such a Californian story: Lorry I. Lokey, the founder of Business Wire will give a minimum of $33 million to help build a home for Stanford’s Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine. Lokey says: “The important thing to me is that stem cells might not only extend life, but also improve the quality of life, as so many people suffer in their later years,” said Lokey, who will turn 80 in March. “But I think stem cells will have applications across the entire life span.” Lokey’s contribution to the School of Medicine—its largest single gift to date from an individual—will launch construction of new stem cell laboratories on campus where scientists will probe the power of these elusive cells in treating conditions as diverse as cancer, stroke and diabetes. Lokey launched Business Wire in San Francisco in 1961 with $2,000 of his own money. It quickly grew to become a news industry powerhouse, now distributing an average of 17,000 corporate and academic press releases a month. “The biotech revolution has become so important to the quality of life,” he said. “To me, the biotech field is going to be very, very hot for the next generation.” Link

Mac Googlers at Apple Headquarters: from Mountain View to Cupertino

Read this nice and brand conscious weekend off story on Official Google Mac Blog. Scott Knaster, Mac Team Technical Writer at Google organized a trip for a “gang of new Mac fans at Google“ from Mountain View to Apple headquarters, Cupertino. At the Caffe Macs they were eating a Google-like terrific food, but not for free, when suddenly “we noticed a slight disturbance in the room, as if all the air had rushed to a single place, over by the salad bar. As you have probably guessed, it was Apple CEO Steve Jobs, grabbing some lunch with Jonathan Ive, Apple’s industrial design guru. As the two moved across the room, there was no great commotion — after all, this probably happens just about every day at Apple — but our Google group and many other folks stopped eating long enough to follow the two rock stars around the room for awhile.” Sounds like a sitting ovation.
Anyway, it would be good to know the ratio of Mac-Windows-Linux users at Google. Guess what? I think Sergey Brin is using a Mac.