-Steve
http://www.thegenesherpa.blogspot.com

Darn, one day when you open the google homepage, you may find something like:

Web Images Video DNA(new) News Maps Gmail more ▼

Creeepy!

There is a LOT of information in your DNA. A lot.

The abysmal failure (so far) of the Human Genome Project to connect to people’s daily lives, even though it’s successful in academic (and PR) terms, is behind several below-the-radar projects. One example is SNPedia, a wiki to foster reading and discussion from an individual’s point of view on the genes (or more precisely, genotypes) with known consequences.

-RB

wife: “oh sergey poo, will you fund my startup?”
serg: “no honey that would be an egregious conflict of interests”
wife: “oh come on sergey poo, don’t you want to fund mama’s little startup?”
serg: “sweetie, it’s just not appropriate for me to do something like that”
wife: “but if you don’t fund my wittle bitty startup mama’s not going to have sex with you any more”
serg: “okay, sergie poo will do it”

If this company “is trying to keep costs low” (and costs are normally everything else than low for such an in-depth-analysis), they are maybe also interested in being able to keep the genome data and use it for building up a similar Genome database to the one from Decode (although they wouldn’t be able to get hereditary information out of such a database with the genomes of random individuals…) For such a task, it would be very wise to have someone who is a database expert and can provide sophisticated search algorithms, such as Google.

Let’s look at the things we’d need in order to make 23andMe useful:

1. Be able to accurately have the genome of a customer. We are many, many long years away from whole genome sequencing (or re-sequencing) of individuals. What they will probably do is look for SNPs using illumina or affymetrix chips, or do a partial sequencing using something similar to 454 Life Sciences (which recently got bought-out by Roche).

2. Suppose that they have the data. We don’t really have a clue as to what to what it means. We have discovered the ubiquity of copy-number variants, of regulatory regions, of siRNA and such very recently. Even if we had the genetic code of an individual we do not have the scientific knowledge to make sense of it yet.

3. Suppose we were to be able to identify all CNVs, rare SNPs, and had complete knowledge of the functional units of a genome. We still wouldn’t know how this relates to disease (for the simple reason that knowing this would require sequencing tens of thousands of human genomes in controlled studies and studying for the various diseases, which brings us back to (1) we don’t have the right technology to do this yet.)

4. We don’t know complete knowledge of disease mechanisms as they are - even if we could study their genetic basis, we wouldn’t know why there is a relationship between them.

5. Most individuals most certainly won’t know how to interpret what the results are saying. The various pitfalls, and ethical implications of how the general public takes on medical results is well studied in publich health and other medical literature.

Google’s involvement:

Google however, could be really useful in organizing worlds (biological / biomedical) knowledge on biology and providing some of its capacities and knowledge, and lift all boats. Many people working in bioinformatics are good scientists but not great software engineers, and even worse usability designers. They also lack the computing infrastructure google has. I see great potential here, but it won’t deliver the greatest amount of monetization by the current ‘adwords’ — they will have to customize for slightly different content, but this should be difficult.

Note that pharma and life sciences is a much larger industry than either software or advertising, thus there are big bucks in advertising, providing services, and market intelligence as well.

These services could range software platforms for data mining, and drug discovery, where google indexes (or hosts) multiple biological databases (for the various -omes, and other kinds) to enable these services.

the vanity corporation is just the twenty-first century version of the junior league.

Google = ‘don’t be evil’

Fox news = ‘fair and balanced’; ‘we report you decide’

They went to stanford.
Larry = Jerry
Filo = Page
Google = Yahoo

What’s with those double O and rry ?

Someday, Google will marry Yahoo. Ewww…