[extropy-chat] The Dawn of Personalized Medicine

[Giu1i0 Pri5c0]

>From Always On: If we look at the IT world, there are a couple of
fundamental laws, which if we had understood back in the '60s and '70s,
would have probably prompted us to invest a lot more. I know that if I had
really understood what Gordon Moore was saying with Moore's Law in the
1960s, I might have bought some Intel stock. He recognized - in 1964 - that
computing power was going to double every 18 to 24 months and the cost would
drop in half. We began to recognize in the mid-1990's that there's almost a
direct correlation between the speed and pace of DNA sequencing and Moore's
Law. We could plot it out: every 18 to 24 months we were cutting the cost of
DNA sequencing in half and doubling the amount of throughput...
Well, what do you know about puzzles? Say you start out with a thousand
pieces. It's really hard for the first few hundred pieces. But then what
happens? As the pieces of the puzzle start coming together, the pace
accelerates. The speed picks up as you get closer to the solution. The
principle is the same with genetics. The more we understand about each gene
and each pathway and human biology, and the more we understand about how
every gene contributes to cancer or other diseases, then the more we
accelerate our understanding of the other genes in the pathway. The results
of this phenomenon are these transforming technologies that can dramatically
change the course of the future by accelerating the rate at which we
understand the molecular basis for disease and discover new drugs. The 1980s
were all about genomics and basic science; the 1990s were really about
industrialization. The 2000s and beyond, I believe, are going to be about
genomics and the consumer.

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