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Decoding the Genome: Serious Infrastructure
Roland Piquepaille writes "The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is one of the largest genomics data centers in the world. In "The Hum and the Genome," the Scientist writes about the IT infrastructure needed to handle the avalanche of data that researchers have to analyze. With its 2,000 processors and its 300 terabytes of storage, the data center uses today about 0.75 megawatts (MW) of power at a cost of 140,000 per year (about $170K). But the data center will need more than a petabyte of storage within three years, and its yearly electricity bill will reach 500,000 (more than $600K) for about 1.4 MW, enough to power more than a thousand homes. The original article gets all the facts, but this summary contains all the essential numbers."
The centre is funded by the Wellcome Trust and the UK's Medical Research Council. The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is a non-trading, non-profit making registered charity. And they tend to make their results open - these are the people who said that the genome should belong to no one individual or company. In other words, if you want to keep your rights without sacrificing the progress of science - we need more places like the Sanger centre.
> "it also raises the spectre of a single large company owning all these combinations."
h tml which describes how the finished data is made publicly available, to all, no charge.
You might be interested to read our data release policy http://www.sanger.ac.uk/Projects/release-policy.s
(I work at the Sanger Centre.)
Dave
Mod parent up.
i lle&as_sitesearch=slashdot.org/ or search slashdot articles on roland piquepaille.
Just have a look on http://www.google.com/search?query=Roland+Piquepa
Real whore here is Timothy. I bet he'll post an ad for your site for some change, too.
It depends. If you are doing somatic cell genetic engineering, then you only fix those cells in the patient in which the defect manifests itself, and not the germ-line cells (ie, sperm and eggs), so the 'fix' is not passed on to the next generation. If instead you modify the germ-line cells as well, then the 'fix' is passed on to the next generation.
One of the main reasons for doing the somatic fix rather than the germ-line fix is that we're still pretty damned new to this genetic engineering thingy, so it's probably a good idea to not fuck with the genetic heritage of future generations just to cure a patient today. However, as the science and technology develops, and we gain more experience with it, our self-assuredness in our abilities will likely increase, and we'll think we know what we're doing enough to risk making 'permanant' changes to the germ-line. I put 'permanant' in quotes, because if we make genetic changes one way, we should be able to turn them back if and when we decide they are mistakes.