Innovation is still bottom-up in IT, what about biotech?

Just a simple filtering & highlighting & regurgitating for you based on Andy Oram’s post apropos of the opening of a larger Cambridge, Massachusetts Google office : Why open source developers can be more productive, and other tales from a Google open house

Along the lines of self-motivated employees, I asked a manager whether most of their new products came from the individual employees or from management. He expressed the conviction that most innovation in most companies comes from individual employees. Where management can help is in finding effective places to fit new features into the organization and product line.

Google found that releasing too many products prevented the public from learning about them and adopting them. Adding a feature to an existing product such as Gmail or Blogger could mean that millions of people adopt it, whereas releasing it as a stand-along product might limit adoption to a few thousand.

The question for me is always how these experiences can be compared and applied to the biotech industry, in this case I am curious how biotechnological innovation is going in the profit sector outside academia. So if you are working at a biotech startup or at a big pharma please share us your opinion (anonymously if you like) in the comments on the nature of innovation at your company!

How to predict the future via Twitter: Google invests in Navigenics

Wow, I guess it’s time for me to move into the stock market business! Here’s the story via David Bradley’s tweet: Julie Kent, Search Engine Journal, April 21st, 2008: Google Wants to Index Genetic Information, Invests in Second DNA Start-Up

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:

The whole tweetstream:

Larry Page is 35 years old today: long live to live long enough!

I’ve always loved the following scene from LOTR, but I’ve always imagined that they are the words of a man who is in a healthy physiological condition due to a robust life extension technology and not due to a mystical ring:

Bilbo: “Today is my one hundred and eleventh birthday!”

Hobbits: “Happy birthday!”

Bilbo: “Alas, eleventy-one years is far too short a time to live among such excellent and admirable hobbits.” [cheers abound.] “I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”

Larry Page is 35 years old today and it’s really easy to consider him as a representative man of his/our generation (I am 33 years old) including his future prospects. A company with an unlimited potential was built on Page’s unfinished PhD. research project.

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.

Why was life extension ruled out of the 14 Grand Engineering Challenges?

I emailed some of my life extension supporter friends because I think we have a ‘future’ situation:

Healthy life extension is not 1 out of the 14 Grand Engineering Challenges…that can be realistically met, most of them early in this century according to the Committee on Grand Challenges for Engineering with members such as Larry Page, Dean Kamen, Craig Venter, Robert Langer and …lifestyle life extensionist, nanovisionary Ray Kurzweil. There is a challenge though called Engineer better medicines and the essay behind looks as if it had been hacked together by Kurzweil and Venter themselves during a sunny Californian Soy Beer Baby Boomer Beach Party. It is about personalized medicine in large and the only hint - I was able to find - to a recent discipline named regenerative medicine is a paragraph, not on, say the challenge of systemic regmed, but on synthetic biology.

It is a big challenge to learn how could healthy lifespan extension as a big and realistic challenge have been left out? Why did Kurzweil (author of the book Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever) not stand up for it? Why nobody out of the luminaries thought that regenerative medicine and stem cells worth discussing more than a tiny side note? And what about Venter, whom I still like to be interview as there are many points in his activity suggesting a life extension connection. Somebody in the committee was clearly against it?

One friend told me that he is not surprised by this, because it was announced at the AAAS meeting, which is very conservative. Out of the committee members Ray Kurzweil, Daniel Hillis, and maybe Dean Kamen would have been supporters of including LE as a challenge.

But.

Xoogler goes biotech

I found this quote in John Battelle’s blog from a recent CNET article on ex-Googlers by Stephanie Olsen, but I’d like to repeat it just with a different emphasis as I found all the other parts interesting for the biotech community except the one sentence bolded by Battelle. So I bolded those parts:

Working without a personal assistant on the top of the big G…is fun!

I’m on my way to a Friday comprehensive exam from stem cell and mitochondrial biology which gives me no time to immerse into blogging this week. I mostly think of big holes in my knowledge like mitochondria and Ca²⁺ signalling. That’s why I can only offer soft things like the following quote from a fresh New Yorker article by Ken Auletta called The Search Party on Google:

The Bubble City Experience: a contemporary paranerd classic

When I first wrote about Aaron Swartz’s unfinished nervous nerd novel, Bubble City, I had just been through chapter 1 and 2. But at the Dallas International Airport, waiting for the London connection on December 22 I had no choice but quickly finish the other 9 chapters posted so far under the pressure of the compelling narrative. Bubble City turned out to be my biggest literature experience of this year and the emphasis is on “literature” here.

The plot in one sentence based on the 11 chapters so far: Jason Barsto (an alternative Swartz) coder of a San Francisco news aggregator startup, called Newsflip (an alternative Reddit) gets hunted down by Google (an alternative Google) because he explores a backdoor in the tricky S-boxes behind the Notated News Analysis (NNA) system of the aggregator code at Newsflip (developed formerly at an alternative Yahoo), by which alternative Google or alternative others can manipulate and dangerously homogenize news recommendations for users.

It is a paranoid parody, a contemporary classic hacker fiction: it is crime and anti-crime, it is love and anti-love, it is real and anti-real but most importantly it is about Google or rather it is the best artistic expression of the emerging Hassliebe to Google so far, that every well informed and networked, responsible alpha geek (like Swartz) feels today. I suspect that even Google employees can feel the same way toward their own company.

Everybody in the tech world has plans with Google and Google has plans with almost everybody.

How to get rid of the Google Eye according to Bubble City: Scroogle and Tor

What’s the best thing to do if Google wants track you down and you are “a geek, the kind of person who searched Google every time a thought passed through his head”. Well, Aaron Swartz’s nervous nerd novel, Bubble City (I summarize my thoughts on it in the next post) has a geeky algorithm to play with in Chapter 9:

Thus, to be sure Google can’t track you, you need to do at least three things: never long in, never accept tracking cookies, and use some kind of anonymization of your IP address (like Scroogle or Tor). And that’s just for the Web.

Google’s knollers and the bloggers: cooperation or competition?

Everybody is comparing Google’s Knol project to Wikipedia intended to be a “repository of knowledge from experts on various topics” (NYT) or “a free, ad-supported publishing system” (Wired), currently a “private, invitation-only knowledge sharing service” (Blogoscoped). But for a biotech blogger like me the first association is to compare Knol to the blogosphere. Just think about blogs and bloggers when reading these lines from the Official Google Blog by author Udi Manber:

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word “knol” as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we’ll do the rest.

So far I could have read the message and mission of WordPress and Typepad (forget Blogger) being not just blog engines but hosts of blogs too, the only real difference is called ads and revenue:

At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads.

The question is how can Knol benefit from the quality blog content on particular topics written by expert bloggers and how can bloggers benefit from contributing to Knol? Would Google be inclined to pay for pivotal blog posts on a particular topic to use them as knols? In many cases the content - the one that Google would like to facilitate with Knol - is already there so it is natural to convert quality blog posts to knols. But why would I, blogger turn to a knoller?

Looks like the G guys are reinventing the blog wheel:

23andMe’s mission: connecting all people on the DNA level or social networking XY.0

In these days, tech companies with MISSIONS are flourishing. I guess you’ve already heard about the company, whose mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. The newly launched, Mountain View based 23andMe seems similar in the mission respect. 23andMe is the first (already successful) and web (or rather Google) - based biotech company offering personalized genome service to its customers including interpreted and highly probabilistic information on the health risks of the customer’s genetic profile. But 23andMe has much more to offer in these early days and I think that mainly the biggest mission behind the company will be to show how different people are irreversibly connected and similar through their genetic material and variants. The company’s Global Similarity Map based on the comparison of the evaluated SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism) variants amongst customers and the Ancestry Service based on the by and large maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA. They will make this mission more explicit by introducing a social networking service around shared genotypes or as it claimed in the Wired article on 23andMe:
This is also where a novel use of social-networking tools comes in. Wojcicki envisions groups of customers coming together around shared genotypes and SNPs, comparing notes about their conditions or backgrounds and identifying areas for further scientific research on their own. “It’s a great way for individuals to be involved in the research world,” Wojcicki says. “You’ll have a profile, and something almost like a ribbon marking participation in these different research papers. It’ll be like, How many Nature articles have you been part of?’” (Social networking will be included in version 2.0 in a matter of months, Avey says.)

The idea of social networking based on genetic similarities and vulnerabilities: this is social networking XY.0 and the challenge

Is it by accident that both Google first ladies are biologists?

Or is it the strongest personal indication of the future of technology? No, it’s not my job to answer this question, but I could be optimistic about the consequences of it. By now the story of Anne Wojcicki, Sergey Brin and 23andMe is a commonplace in the blogosphere. While Anne is graduated with a BS in Biology from Yale, Larry Page’s future wife Lucy Southworth happens to be a biology (genetics) grad student at Stanford interested in aging research too.

Learning new things from your partner is the most effective way of quickly acquiring ordered, contextual and practical knowledge. A good example is Aubrey de Grey who learned biology from his wife, experimental drosophilist and fine-tuned scientist of chromosomal mechanics Adelaide Carpenter.

For instance here is how Lucy explains nerve structure and Multiplex sclerosis: Look, Larry you’re familiar with this…

Many nerves are like an electric cord. An electric cord usually contains a thin metal wire covered in plastic that insulates the metal. The plastic layer keeps the electricity from leaving the wire. This can both speed up the electrical flow and keep nearby objects safe from the electricity.

But this could be interesting for you too: The metal wire in a nerve cell is called the axon. This is the part that carries the electrical signal. The insulation on a nerve cell is called myelin. Like in the electric cord, the myelin keeps the electrical signal from leaving the nerve.

As I said, in MS a patient’s immune system attacks the myelin destroying it. This affects a patient’s nerves like stripping the insulation off an electric cord does. Some of the electricity will short out causing the nerve to not conduct electricity as well any more. Also the electricity might jump off the axon and affect other nerves.

IT friendly explanation, isn’t it? Now I can imagine an average conversation amongst Lucy and Larry on how to solve the following problem:

Last minute, low budget Halloween costume: Mr. Evil Google

Components from top to bottom:

Insulated Test/Jumper Leads

wig

blue ethernet cable

original Google T-shirt (I got mine at the Euro Maker Faire)

badge (actually I used my SciFoo badge just inside out, there was a modified Google Search Box on the other side with an “I am feeling Evil” button)

components desperately needed, but I haven’t had the time to make them: horns and Google spiders for crawling (the arachnid-centric names for the Web are ideal for Halloween reasons)

assumed background knowledge to recognize Mr. Evil Google: Google’s corporate motto

Problem: For a Halloween costume to be cool it should be targeted for the local Halloween audience and New Orleans is not the geek but the freak capital of the world, so almost nobody recognized me.