“Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend”, Mao once said during the Revolutionary Days of 1957. Now in the middle of a genomics revolution, it feels that way in the market for genomics software to analyze next-generation sequencing data. New companies are being formed, large software and hardware firms are expanding into the life sciences, and others are offering in addition to software options the implementation of a cloud-based service.
The myth of the complete genome is something that is not commonly known to active observers of genomic technologies. (The term ‘active observer’ is from the point of view of one with varying degrees of background in the biological sciences, and is in noway an aspersion.) The ‘first draft’ of the human genome was announced at a Clinton-era press conference on June 26, 2000, and it was an agreement between the two famously competitive individuals (Francis Collins and Craig Venter) representing the public (NIH and DOE) effort and the private one (Celera). This first draft was exactly that – about 90% complete, and the completed version was declared in 2003. This is not to discount the first seminal publications of this draft, as in 2001 when these papers were published (in Science and Nature respectively) the largest previously sequenced genome was 1/25th the size. In other words, the human genome represented a 25-fold leap in size and complexity of anything done to-date.
Over the past few years I’ve been interested in contributing back to the community I live in, but as a busy father-of-three (ages 3 to 9) there just isn’t the ability to ‘cold-call’ a local high-school and volunteer.
That is, until a family vacation took us to Colonial Williamsburg VA and a tour of the Governor’s Mansion. There was a person there with a ‘Wootton Patriots’ T-shirt, and, well, as Newsweek indicated it was one of the country’s top 100 high schools in their 2010 ranking, I thought I’d speak up and ask if he happened to be involved with the local high school.