Gene research and Silicon Valley-style computing are starting to merge.

J. Craig Venter

Genome scientist and entrepreneur J. Craig Venter is best known for being the first person to sequence his own genome, back in 2001.

This year, he started a new company, Human Longevity, which intends to sequence one million human genomes by 2020, and ultimately offer Web-based programs to help people store and understand their genetic data (see Microbes and Metabolites Fuel an Ambitious Aging Project).

Venter says that hes sequenced 500 peoples genomes so far, and that volunteers are starting to also undergo a battery of tests measuring their strength, brain size, how much blood their hearts pump, and, says Venter, just about everything that can be measured about a person, without cutting them open. This information will be fed into a database that can be used to discover links between genes and these traits, as well as disease.

But thats going to require some massive data crunching. To get these skills, Venter recruited Franz Och, the machine-learning specialist leading Google Translate. Now Och will apply similar methods to studying genomes in a data science and software shop that Venter is establishing in Mountain View, California.

The hire comes just as Google itself has launched a similar-sounding effort to start collecting biomedical data (see Whats a Moon Shot Worth These Days). Venter calls Googles plans for a biomedical database a baby step, a much smaller version of what we are doing.

Whats clear is that genome research and data science are coming together in new ways, and at a much larger scale than ever before. We asked Venter why.

How are we doing in genomics?

In my view there have not been a significant number of advances. One reason for that is that genomics follows a law of very big numbers. Ive had my genome for 15 years, and theres not much I can learn because there are not that many others to compare it to.

Read the rest here:
Three Questions for J. Craig Venter

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