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Genomics Impact On US Economy Approaches $1 Trillion
sciencehabit writes "Despite a slow economy, business in genomics has boomed and has directly and indirectly boosted the U.S. economy by $965 billion since 1988, according to a new study (pdf). In 2012 alone, genomics-related research and development, along with relevant industry activities, contributed $31 billion to the U.S. gross national product and helped support 152,000 jobs, the biomedical funding advocacy group United for Medical Research announced today in Washington, D.C. Based on total U.S. spending, the country gets $65 back for every $1 it spends on the field."
So in other words this stuff really is overpriced?
Industry Group claims it is useful in own report, film at eleven.
No, it's more like "please don't stop funding science, specifically this one part."
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I think public funding of basic research is one of the few areas where the federal government is justified in spending significant amounts of money.
But "generating economic impact" is a useless measure; the federal government could create a trillion dollars of economic impact by forcing everybody to burn down their houses or by simply forcing everybody to pay twice as much for their health care (well, they are trying the latter), but we wouldn't be better off as a result.
The foul smells emanating from my ass have boosted the economy by $500 million through increased sales of air freshners!
There is enough economic incentive to do this kind of research anyway that it does not need to rely wholly on grants. And if the majority of this research comes out of grants. I am going to say we have seen better results from NPO's and private charities building food forests and doing experimental farming in places like Africa.
The majority of articles I have seen in the news leads me to believe that genomic agricultural research is mostly to keep the rich people rich. That includes the Chinese rich along with the Western rich. Two classes of untouchables at this point.
I still eat what comes out of publics and its no were near as good as what the Swedes eat. I think the American people are getting bamboozled. I don't have sources and citations for you. Just gut feeling and instinct. But its good enough for me. And I know how I feel today compared to how I felt 10 years ago.
*So no net benefit to society as a whole and this article is just a bunch of $$ numbers to make politicians feel good about themselves and middle men university grads.
If President McCain hadn't vetoed that economic stimulus bill, we wouldn't have a slow economy.
Hopefully are economy gets back on track where we are used to seing it ;) http://www.americanbullypitbullpuppies.com/
An industry advocacy group discovered that their industry is really important to the US economy! I wonder how much it would have cost for them to discover that their industry is nowhere near as important as they think?
This is about the human genome, you goof, not crops. The money is from medical innovations. RTFA!
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This has nothing to do with Monsanto. This is about medical research that has been boosted by advances such as mapping the human genome.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Quite a cunundrum, isn't it? Most everyone wants to see science advance, most everyone wants everyone to benefit from those scientific advances. How best to do this by encouraging both research and sharing? Still not sure a 20yr monopoly is the best method, but so far have seen very few viable alternatives presented that serve both the benefactors and benefactees.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Genomics is not genetic engineering, and even if it was, genetic science & technology are not a corporate conspiracy, and furthermore, even Monsanto's patents are not that long (take a wild guess at what ends next year).
I think your tinfoil hat is on too tight.
OK, $31 billion contributed to the U.S. gross national product is a good thing.
But this results in only 152,000 jobs???
Someone has manged to tag this "wtfisgenomics". Really, people? I didn't know there were that many slashdot readers who were still stuck in 1994.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Besides better understanding of ourselves, vastly improved drugs, methods to understand and predict inherited diseases, risk factor management, and more effective treatments, what has genomics done for us?
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
Obviously genomics is the study of gnome genealogies. Come one people, this is basic english. :P
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
Ultimately, this is about people paying to stay alive longer. I guess a real number, is that people can last longer before retirement. I guess it also makes treatment of people under the death panel age, cheaper.
We have not faced the possibility of keeping a person alive and functioning for a very long time, with the only limitation being cost. Other nations have death panels, and they keep costs down. What will America choose to do?
Brought peace?
(Or, less in line with the joke, understanding of evolution and our place in it. I guess that's sort of like peace, but the Judean People's Front won't have any of it.)
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Except that my first take on this was what innovations. Yes, a lot of stuff is hyped up, but I've seen precious little utility for genomics in the trenches.
I think this study is total BS - especially since the methodology is hidden. Sequencing the human genome is interesting, but the real key is sequencing other genomes and comparing them. That's happening with abandon now.
And we're finally getting a handle on what controls the genome and how all the little pieces fit together. That should yield some better therapies but aside from a few edge cases in cancer treatment, there isn't much out there. And it's not like these cancer treatments have overwhelmingly improved survival - improvements of 20 - 50% are typical. Nothing to sneeze at, but not the Holy Grail.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The "Judean People's Front" are traitors, not like the People's Front of Judea.
Obviously genomics is the study of gnome genealogies
Yes, I'm quite sure that is what ... oh, what was that pesky search engine called ... told me. Damnit infoseek!
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
It's a clear implication of the post. Are retarded or just being intentional dense?
(1) Not at all, it is indicated the report is biased and less reliable than an unbiased report. Whether it is accurate is an entirely different question than whether it is biased. An alleged murderer may have his mother testify that he was home with her at the time of the murder, for example, and her testimony is biased and therefore less reliable regardless of whether it is accurate.
(2) Ad hominem attacks are not nerdly.
Woah, woah, what?
Except that my first take on this was what innovations.
Every single drug and test invented in the past twelve years has been absolutely dependent on understanding the sequence of the human genome and how its components play together. 15 new anti-cancer drugs were approved in 2012 alone, the most bountiful year for FDA approvals since 1995.
Yes, a lot of stuff is hyped up, but I've seen precious little utility for genomics in the trenches.
Then you've never heard of this? Or this? How much more trench-y do you need?
I think this study is total BS - especially since the methodology is hidden.
The third page links to the full report, noting that it includes the full methodology behind the study. The word "methodology" is right there in bright blue.
Sequencing the human genome is interesting, but the real key is sequencing other genomes and comparing them. That's happening with abandon now.
As far as human health is concerned, the primary questions are (a) how do we work? (b) how do the things that interact with us work? and (c) how does our environment affect us? While many model organisms provide excellent snapshots of simpler genomes that we can use to unravel complex mechanisms (like cell division in yeast), comparative genomics really only teaches us about evolution. It's not relevant to medicine, outside of predicting the evolution of pathogens. We're not benefiting human medicine by sequencing, say, red pandas or sea turtles, although these things are certainly important for other reasons. There are occasionally exceptional genomes, like the naked mole rat (immune to cancer), but these are rare.
And we're finally getting a handle on what controls the genome and how all the little pieces fit together.
The biggest recent contributor to that has been ENCODE, which, again, was a direct analysis of human data and did not involve any other species.
That should yield some better therapies but aside from a few edge cases in cancer treatment, there isn't much out there. And it's not like these cancer treatments have overwhelmingly improved survival - improvements of 20 - 50% are typical. Nothing to sneeze at, but not the Holy Grail.
We picked all the low-hanging fruit like phenylketonuria as soon as it became technologically feasible. Problems like cancer and severe autism are extremely complex, and the only hope we have to tackle them is through an extremely intimate understandinf of the human genome.
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I've been on slashdot over a decade. I've seen young-earth creationists, anti-vaxers, global warming deniers, libertarians, and intelligent design pushers. This is the first thread where I've burned through 10 mod points down moderating the willfully ignorant science haters. Here's a news flash: those of us who do science have to have IP protection. If we don't, we don't get paid. We don't get paid, we don't do science, and scientific advances come to a screeching halt. This used to be news for nerds, stuff that matters. I guess news for nerds has degenerated to the point where if it isn't about playing xbox or some other mainstream anti-education anti-intelligence bilge slashdot is incapable of having intelligent conversation. The few of you who are correcting these idiots I wish the best, but I've just about had it.
(*) Except that the numbers they've published are gross, and it's the net that counts.
Pardon me, but are you a moron?
Apparently going off on tangent Monsanto wrecked my point. Which is everyday people, most of us, who don't reach elite levels of self importance and education and monetary reward from our "betters" aint seen shit and were still pissed and think this is bullshit.
Oh well. I'm trying to talk to the wrong crowed here. Let me find another soap box somewhere else.
I think figuring out genetics and giving the info away because its our motherfucking universities getting grants and doing the research which we all pay for out of all of our pockets would be sweet. By the way. And if that indeed is how this works great.
Sounds to me like corporate speak for, lets patent 5 more cancer drugs and watch the flies die because they got fucked by their environment, us, industry, bad food, bad lifestyles, didn't have an opportunity because they were just dumb bear drinking humans... not all seeing eye ones...
When you can have it paid for by the gov't. When will people learn that the rich always have socialism. The only question is will everyone else have it.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
As far as human health is concerned, the primary questions are (a) how do we work? (b) how do the things that interact with us work? and (c) how does our environment affect us? While many model organisms provide excellent snapshots of simpler genomes that we can use to unravel complex mechanisms (like cell division in yeast), comparative genomics really only teaches us about evolution. It's not relevant to medicine, outside of predicting the evolution of pathogens. We're not benefiting human medicine by sequencing, say, red pandas or sea turtles, although these things are certainly important for other reasons. There are occasionally exceptional genomes, like the naked mole rat (immune to cancer), but these are rare.
*jaw drops*... please tell me you're joking... i'm guessing you're an undergrad and you know just enough to be dangerous (but clearly not enough to have an intelligent opinion). i am particularly amazed by this sentence: "comparative genomics really only teaches us about evolution. It's not relevant to medicine, outside of predicting the evolution of pathogens." please, do go on
I disagree vehemently with GP as he/she is obviously clueless about the subject matter. However, I also take issue with the implication of your snippy reply that crops are somehow divorced from or not associated with progress in genomic research. I assure you, agriculture has not been left behind by recent technological innovations in this area. Many of the underlying tools and techniques jump started by the HGP is routinely used by the research arm of the USDA in the interest of the American public. During a 10 month stint at the Western Regional Research Center in Albany CA, I provided lab support for a protein chemist who studied the nature of food allergens as part of an effort to increase accessibility of nutrition to those with food allergies. For my boss, bioinformatic tools were part of his routine. For me, many of the genomic databases became my friends. Scores of molecular biology experiments I was performing couldn't be done without checking libraries or catalogs such as those at NCBI established in the wake of the HGP. A rising tide raises all boats. We may not have worked directly with the human genome, but we're all beneficiaries just the same.
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hi, sorry for my last comment. i've calmed down and realized it's ok for people to not know what's up, especially in the world of genomics. lol. for the most part, it sounds like you do know a lot. but actually, comparative genomics and evolution are incredibly useful to medicine. i realize you were just contributing your knowledge to the discussion, and there is nothing wrong with that. since the internet is anonymous it's easy to write a negative reply to someone, but you know... there are always real people behind the mask. and it's great to see people interested in genomics. oh god, what have i done, lol
Yes, I've followed the boom of "bioinformatics" majors and their spectacular inability to get jobs. I've been to academic conferences that talked big about the promise of genomics, never mind all the unemployed PhDs scurrying around looking for jobs. I have read academic journals that talked big about the job prospects of such students, quoting an exceptional graduate that managed to get an assistant professorship somewhere. When I asked the writer about other graduates, they acknowledged that they had only interviewed that one student, and have no idea about how other graduates did. Why yes, "genomic medicine" has produced its laughable failures such as Bi-dil, along with other new age "biotech" companies that make up whatever random DNA and sell the "genome data" to customers, telling them that they are at risk for whatever random diseases. If you test a sugar pill on enough "ethnic groups", it will appear successful in at least one of them. And so it goes for billions of random DNA letters -- one can use the data to prove anything they like. Accordingly, real academics do not take genetics seriously.
Sir, what are your credentials? Instead of making unfounded assumptions about your Interlocutor behind the shield of an anonymous coward, would you care to comment substantively on the subject at hand? I was prepared to rebut GP, but I'd like to hear what you have to say first.
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Oh well. I'm trying to talk to the wrong crowed here. Let me find another soap box somewhere else.
Instead of getting on another soap box and saying anything at all, would you consider stopping to listen to what others are saying? There are many insights being expressed here that are worth thinking about and learning from. If you do have to say something, consider asking an engaging question.
========== "Hello World" in my programming language of choice: ATG - LET THERE BE LIFE - TAG ==========
Without a doubt that's true, and I'd never propose to debate it—it seems sometimes I spend half my life staring at NCBI and ENSEMBL records; to be honest, I can't think of a corner of the biological sciences that hasn't been affected in some way by the techniques or results of the HGP. That being said, I felt that it was important to ward off flayzernax's discussion of the topic, particularly since it was starting to accrue some supremely lazy mod points.
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..... comparative genomics really only teaches us about evolution. It's not relevant to medicine, outside of predicting the evolution of pathogens. We're not benefiting human medicine by sequencing, say, red pandas or sea turtles, although these things are certainly important for other reasons. There are occasionally exceptional genomes, like the naked mole rat (immune to cancer), but these are rare.
Comparative genomics are of enormous importance to the field of cisgenesis/intragenesis. Somewhat inbetween traditional plant breeding and inter-species genetic engineering, intragenics seeks to modify a target organism by transferring genes from related organisms. When applied to agriculture, there are practical savings in resources expended when trying to create new cultivars of existing crops. For more see: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17692557
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My lab works on protozoan parasite genomes in the context of gene network evolution. At a hospital. I'm a doctoral student in computational biology, and my core expertise is sequence analysis. I promise you that I'm well aware of what I said.
I think you, honestly, misread. My point was that sequencing random organisms is not medically useful; it's focusing on diseases (to divine means of attack) or some carefully-selected model organism (to understand a simplified version of ourselves) that brings us important information. And for the most part, we've got the data on the useful models for humans. No one is rushing out and proposing that we replace S. cerevisiae with some obscure protozoan for studying the cell cycle—that work is done.
Health research is much more more now concerned with studying the subtleties of the human genome itself, such as with the ENCODE project, and comparisons with other species have shown us that the new information we've garnered from ENCODE—the huge portion of the genome that's transcribed—is not very conserved at the sequence level between species. I think it's very unlikely that the cure for, say, autism, will involve any cross-species comparisons. Of course, there will always be viruses and pathogenic bacteria, as well as fungal, protozoan, and metazoan parasites.
While certainly there's a lot to do for studying such diseases and their models in depth, those aren't genomes that we're particularly concerned with comparing back to humans, except perhaps to make sure that we can identify a unique drug target that won't harm the patient. That falls under the "evolution of pathogens" part, although perhaps "predicting" was the wrong word.
So, ultimately, my point is: genome comparisons and evolutionary biology are both absolutely essential to medicine, but not all of them. There are a lot of species out there that we're sequencing now which will never be of medical value, and a lot of stuff we're learning about evolution isn't directly applicable either. No human lives will ever hinge on knowing the composition of the Pelagibacter ubique genome, although the environmental genomics knowledge that resulted has certainly opened our eyes to the importance and complexity of the microbial communities that live in symbiosis with the human body. It doesn't really matter that the extracellular matrix is primarily made up of re-used protein domains that are over a billion years old, although ECM research will one day cure a wide variety of human ailments.
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Well, yes... but I did said medicine. I'm pretty sure that falls under "other reasons." :)
For what it's worth, I'm not really a medical person at heart, even though I'm surrounded by medical stuff constantly. I'd rather navel-gaze at the LUCA or something. But, yeah, comparative genomics is critical in a wide range of natural resources industries; fisheries and forestry in particular are very concerned about defending their stocks from diseases. (At least, that's what the grant in my job description said.)
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Thanks for clarifying your point. I think it was the ".....only teaches us about evolution." bit that threw some of us off as to why comparative genomics should ever be useful to anyone. Not a bad perspective, but maybe a bit awkwardly worded.
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Mesmerisingly, no matter how long I spend on a post here, there always seems to be some way to make them clearer in hindsight.
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Wait was this stuff not called genetics, like two seconds ago? Whats the difference between genetics and genomics?
Have any citations for vastly improved drugs and more effective treatments? From my reading there has actually been very little progress in this area over the last few decades.
Yes, it's pretty amusing to RTFA and read between the lines. The calculation of ROI from tax dollars is predicated on no other investment from private sources, even though they mention in passing that there's been substantial private input.
I'm all for funding science, but this sort of hype is just propaganda for the proles and members of congress.
paid for by Batelle
Genomics booming? News to me. If anything, we've only been feeling a vast reduction in grant approval lately. We're lucky to even get the expected 1 out of 15 submissions approved. The diabetes genomic group we work with is also feeling the heat.
So your argument boils down to 'Where's my flying car?' with a dash of well poisoning and seasoned with willful ignorance. Well as a different everyday blue collar person, you don't speak for 'us'.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
You know, ever since they made their planned move to patent human genetics and all that?
It's "Genomics' Impact on US Economy Approaches $1 Trillion".
Without the apostrophe after the s, Genomics has no relationship to the US economy, since it's not possessive. Come on. This is fourth grade English.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
I consider this particular battle lost. No point in listening to what I already know... I have heard it all before. I don't necessarily disagree. But I have a different perspective on our 'grant system' and Universities.
Splitters!
Comparative genetics/genomics is of HUGE value to medicine and pharmacogenomics. The very essence of of drug discovery is based on selecting animal model and exploring mechanism of action and protein structure in several animals. Having outliers organisms is very important to having power in comparative analysis and accidentally red panda and sea turtle would make nice outliers. To simplify this imagine you need to know if a residues is critical for the function of a protein- you look in sea turtle and you that it is conserved, just as in chimp and rhesus and rodents. Pretty good hint this is an important residue. Samantha, this was a free lesson, but reading some good drug discovery book would be helpful for you. Most biologics are produced in CHO (Chinese hamster ovary cell line). We frequently need to know the sequence of the CHO/hamster genome.
While I'm grateful for your comments, I'm afraid you're late to the party; I'd advise you to read some of the subsequent comments. My point was that sequencing biological diversity was not pertinent to medicine. I intended to exclude model systems from my declaration, but that wasn't perfectly clear.
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And I am saying that it is. You cannot simply exclude drug discovery from medicine now, can you? Or biologics production. No matter how you look at your statement it is simply wrong. And yes- I did read the other comments. So I did not see anyone mention drug discovery. Perhaps you are unaware how drug discovery works, but I have been in the field long enough to tell you what you say is very far from the truth.
Most of the outliers used as benchmarks that I've seen are frogs, like Xenopus tropicalis. These genomes are generally sufficiently well curated and distant from our own to support arguments about conservation. It's excessive to worry about taking a census from the entire tree of life, particularly when the actual biochemists in charge of drug production don't trust bioinformatics anyway, and ultimately will carry out detailed structural analyses and mutation assays on the final candidate targets.
A very coarse estimate is sufficient, as evidenced by the huge wealth of drug targets that have been identified even without the consideration of a comprehensive survey of the tree of life. Certainly there is room for refinement, and perhaps you'll see a small improvement in predictive accuracy, but proving the point that the nice big protein sequence alignment figure in the errata of the paper has a bunch of Ws where we have a Y really only requires a dozen or so pertinent examples; the returns are very diminishing. If you have to sequence ten thousand obscure mammals just to find one that has a deletion mutation right where you want it, it's probably not representative.
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I am sorry, but you do not understand drug discovery process. You also speak like a person who has tons of experience in the field. Which I think is not the case. It will do you good (and to your career) to have more humility and knowledge and make less profound statements. Like this one: "...particularly when the actual biochemists in charge of drug production don't trust bioinformatics anyway,..." Maybe there are pharma companies where biochemists do not work with bioinformaticians. The ones I am aware of definitely go the other way.
I have to say that as somebody tangentially involved in evolutionary biology research (boring computational stuff), I appreciate and agree with most of your input in this discussion, however it has to be said that you're being a bit too dismissive of studies on non-human, non-model species. There is much to be learned about some very fundamental questions in molecular biology, not all of which might necessarily be answered by studying in-bred lab rats. It's my belief there is a mountain of data (sadly of poor quality either in controls/methods or provenance/curation) which could lead to questions and further studies of these "alien" species (Sea slugs, insects, plants) which have answers to important, basic fundamentals which wouldn't be as obvious by sticking to the utter desert of homogeneous specimens which medical research relies upon today.
That's not to say in-bred lab rats are the wrong tool for the job, but if that's all we're limited to, our discoveries will be similarly limited.
I'm kinda using a more flexible definition of model organism here; if a sea slug provides a lot of information about some particular system then it should be called a model too. I really wanted to say that sequencing for diversity's sake, like ColdWetDog was implying, gives us very diminishing returns. When it comes to drug design, the amount of information that can be garnered from analysing large chunks of the tree of life falls off fairly quickly, despite how pretty the heat maps may look. A couple dozen nearby genomes that say (for example) a given residue is essential is not generally going to be greatly improved by doing the same comparison with a thousand—especially when the whole thing's going to be tested biochemically anyway. (Despite how kirovs seems pretty upset with me for saying this.)
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That's cool. I understand the original article is about human genome research, but I still consider that you're thinking rather narrowly - but what do I know, so far my involvement in bioinformatics has only been accidental, I'm an engineer really. But just as an anecdote, I worked with a couple of unrelated teams - sponsored by pharma companies - to do basic "alpha taxonomy" and biology research on scientifically-neglected organsims (they're not cute or furry!). They make themselves out of (or secrete) interesting compounds potentially useful for cancer treatments. But because the biology/population dynamics of these things are so poorly understood, simply knowing where the populations exist, how diverse these populations are (sometimes "same species" individuals are chemically different in important ways - Due to life cycle? Are they just different forms of the same species? Or do the taxonomists need to split the species up? How are they interbreeding? What role does the compound of interest play in them? Etc) makes repeatability of these chemical assays on subsequent indviduals really quite difficult.
And in any case, I'm sure you're aware of all the interesting arguments for biosecurity/invasive species/food security etc... but that's getting off topic :)
The protozoan parasite work my lab does spawned out of stuff that was once like that. The genus Plasmodium has over two hundred species, and is often said to have one species for every worthwhile animal in Africa (although in truth there's a lot of overlap, and about a dozen of them can attack humans.)
In defence of my original and somewhat-creaky post, I'd file that under the rare "exceptional genomes" category. Such findings may seem immense, but compared to the unbelievable scale of the whole tree of life, they're pretty exotic. And I'd still contend that, whether counting patents, diseases, or mutations, most of the useful information can be gleaned directly from the organisms we've already studied to death.
And on that last off-topic note: bizarrely, Canada Geese are one of the numerous invasive species in New Zealand.
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