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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.
This is about the human genome, you goof, not crops. The money is from medical innovations. RTFA!
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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
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.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!