A few weeks ago some of my colleagues and I recorded a conversation with George Church, a Harvard University geneticist and one of the founders of modern genomics. In the resulting podcast, you’ll hear Church offer his thoughts on the coming transformation of medicine, whether genes should be patentable, and whether the public is prepared to deal with genetic data.
Here’s how Church characterizes the state of genomics:
It’s kind of like ’93 on the Web. In fact, in a certain sense, it’s more sophisticated than electronics because we have inherited three billion years of amazing technology that was just like a spaceship that was parked in our back yard and we’re just reverse-engineering and probably not fully utilizing even the stuff that we’ve discovered so far.
A few other helpful links:
- George’s book, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves
- CRISPR technology, which might find applications in a handful of sub-fields of bioengineering
- The Supreme Court’s 9-0 decision in Association for Molecular Pathology vs. Myriad Genetics, Inc. held that “A naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated, but cDNA is patent eligible because it is not naturally occurring.”
- Church founded PersonalGenomes.org to make genomic and health-record data freely available
On this podcast from O’Reilly Media: Tim O’Reilly, Roger Magoulas, Jim Stogdill, Mike Loukides, and Jon Bruner. Subscribe to the O’Reilly Radar podcast through iTunes or SoundCloud, or directly through our podcast’s RSS feed.