For instance, a coffee drinker who also smokes may, on average, live longer than someone who smokes but doesn't drink coffee as well. Likewise for red meat, less exercise, etc...
This approach may be applicable for a study looking at factors, where we have a good idea how tho weight the contribution of each factor. The people who did the study not only did not to verify that the statements were true, they didn't even bother to follow up with the same question one more time while the study was running. How do they know that a snapshot they took back in 1996 was still true for the population in 2000, 2005 and 2008?
The NCI Office of Media Relations apparently were a little clueless on the facts they were reporting. The study actually finds that relatively elderly people (50 to 71) who said that they drink coffee (the question was asked once, actual coffee intake was never confirmed) were less like to die within a period of about 12 years. The study is garbage. Luckily the PR department's interpretation made it sound comical. Who says that PR departments are useless?
Currently there are amount 800 million people (a very impressive number!), but there is room for over 6 billion more. And those won't be joining MySpace, Google+ or Diaspora, they will join Facebook because that's where everyone is.
Last time I checked 800 million is way less than 6 billion (about 13% of 6 billion), which kind of contradicts the statement that 'that's where everyone is'
Working in investment industry, I...
Oh is that where the fuzzy math comes from?
Before I reach for my wallet, could mister financial industry explain how facebook's revenue (around 1bilion) justifies the current valuation of 100 billion? Short of making every single living person on the planet a facebook member and then quadrupling their net income per user (currently at about $1) I don't see how any investment made now will break even in the next 5 years.
Yeah, that's what biologist spend their time on. Trying to figure out how to make bug deadlier to humans. I suggest we get rid of them scientist and go back to the good old small pox/black death/polyo days.
You will be wasting your time, unless you also know how to make it resistant to current vaccines and neuraminidase inhibitors:
To assess whether current control measures may be effective against the H5 transmissible reassortant mutant virus, we examined the reactivity of sera from individuals vaccinated with an H5N1 prototype vaccine38 against a virus possessing the N158D/N224K/Q226L/T318I mutations in HA. We found that pooled human sera from individuals immunized with this vaccine reacted with the virus possessing the mutant H5 HA (N158D/N224K/Q226L/T318I) at a higher titre than with a wild-type H5 HA virus (VN1203/PR8; Supplementary Table 6), indicating that current H5N1 vaccines would be efficacious against the H5 transmissible reassortant mutant virus. In addition, the H5 transmissible reassortant mutant virus (HA(N158D/N224K/Q226L/T318I)/CA04) was highly susceptible to a licensed NA inhibitor, oseltamivir (Supplementary Table 7). These experiments show that appropriate control measures would be available to combat the transmissible virus described in this study.
Thanks for clearing this up. I missed the output per watt stats and I couldn't find any information about the directionality of the philips bulb. The Feit claims 180 degrees which is not bad. The color is important, but 3000K is not that much colder than 2700K especially when the bulb is bright (this of course is personal perception).
It is not that this cannot happen in science - more that the bad science will always eventually be revealed eventually. TFA only serves to reinforce this idea. Though it is a tragedy that these particular problem studies were so lacking in scientific rigor, it is reassuring that the peer review system ultimately brought them to light, even if it took some time to do so.
Unfortunately the peer review system did not bring them to light. If anything the peer review system of grants and publications reinforced the crappy science (look at table 1 in the article, the reproducible articles were actually referenced less). What brought it to light was that somebody (Amgen) spent tons of money and effort to reproduce the studies and went ahead to announce the aggregate negative data. I don't see the specific studies being quoted. From my contacts in the industry I hear this story all the time. I personally moved to the cancer research field 2 years ago and I spent most of my time since then trying to navigate between artifacts due to poorly controlled experiments and pure lies.
Having said that, I don't know of a good alternative to the peer review system. I would rather see peer review being enhanced with more open pre-publication access (like Arxiv) where more people can comment on data before it gets published.
Another approach is to get NIH to rethink the amount of 'grant overhead' - money that go to the institution instead of the researchers to cover things like utility bills and facilities maintenance. Right now it stands at 50% of the grant award ($250K R01 grant would pay the institution $125K), which is more than twice than the overhead non-for profit organizations allow on their grants (10-20%). That's a lot of money and it creates a 'business' where institutions will pressure researchers to compete for NIH funding at any cost so they can get more overhead. In some cases universities even borrow money to expand research space and recruit reserachers, again with the sole goal of getting more 'overhead'. This was sustainable while the NIH budget was expanding, but in the recent years the budget hasn't grown much, which has made the competition even more fierce. The incentive to publish anything so you can get grants has become enormous, because now the NIH grant money not only affect your ability to do research but also your job security entirely depends on it, as the university will kick you out very quickly if you don't bring in the NIH grants. In addition the large overhead eats money that can be spent directly on research thus allowing more thorough studies.
There is also the issue with the NIH mandate which is to cure disease. This is not bad in itself, unless you realize that NIH is the biggest game in town as far as biology research goes ($30B vs $7B for NSF, and NSF funds all kinds of research). So we throw this pile of money with the major goal of curing diseases (aka translation research), creating a disproportional incentive to bring 'practical' discoveries like drugs, therapies and diagnostic tests instead of understanding biological phenomena. The sad part is that the translational research derives from basic research and if you don't have a solid base all you can come up with is junk (do I need to explain the 'garbage in, garbage out' concept?).
Dear Roblimo, how stupid do you think the slashdot audience is? If you can't keep your ads apart from your stories, you probably need to find yourself a new audience. I would suggest moving to day time TV.
Can somebody explain to me why did these guys go to this conference? In my experience there are two reasons to go to a conference:
1. Business - meet people learn new things
2. Pleasure - screw the talks and go skying
This conference is in Paris of all places and if they don't care about the place and the talks why the hell did they go there. I am pretty sure every single one of the participants has better internet connection at home.
Yep, Sprint double dips into the data fee bucket. That's reason one why I am not renewing my 2 year contract with them. I am going to stick to my old android phone and the grandfathered data plan until one of them dies. Then I am going to switch to another carrier (not sure how this will work out because the only other alternative here is AT&T). The second reason I am not upgrading is that they are converting their network to LTE. I don't know how many of the phones they are selling now will be compatible with the new LTE network. My guess is none (motorola photon may be?). Can anyone enlighten me on this?
Honestly, after the ClearWire, LightSquare and MetroPCS debacles I am surprise that Sprint is still in business. Anybody that signs up for service with them right now must be out of their minds.
Ummm, the latter is exactly what evolution is. Mutations occur, the resulting changes are either propogated because they provide some objective benefit, removed from the system because they are detrimental, or become part of the background noise of genetic variation if they are neither harmful nor beneficial.
Ummm, I think the parent has it better than you. Evolution is about creating 'different' rather than 'objectively improved' organisms. A mutation can be fixed in the population not only trough natural selection, but also through genetic drift. So genetic variations that are neither harmful nor beneficial (aka neutral) can become the predominant genotype and not just 'noise'. In fact genetic drift will fix even 'objectively' disadvantageous mutations as long as they are not under strong negative selection (high cholesterol at later stages of life anyone?). Beside the separation of 'good' and 'bad' mutations is not clear cut, because it depends on the environment in which the organism lives. And as we know environments have the pesky tendency to change. Are mutations that give you sickle cell anemia good or bad? The answer is: depends on where you live. If you live in a place with endemic malaria, having a mutated copy of the beta-globin gene may come handy.
Free Program Predicts How Troublesome a Genetic Mutation Is
No it doesn't.
This is yet another case of how stupid PR does damage to otherwise good science. The original paper (not the PR release) describes a statistical model. The model tells you how likely it is for a mutation to affect splicing. According to ROC curve on figure 4 it isn't nearly as selective or sensitive as you need it to be for any clinical application. It is however a great research tool. The PR article makes another false assumption, by stating that mutations affecting the splicing of an exon invariably cause 'trouble'. In fact it is well established that there is a significant variability in exon usage in perfectly healthy humans (citations below).
1. Kwan, Tony, David Benovoy, Christel Dias, Scott Gurd, David Serre, Harry Zuzan, Tyson A. Clark, et al. “Heritability of Alternative Splicing in the Human Genome.” Genome Res. 17, no. 8 (August 1, 2007): 1210–1218.
2. Zhang, Wei, Shiwei Duan, Emily O. Kistner, Wasim K. Bleibel, R. Stephanie Huang, Tyson A. Clark, Tina X. Chen, et al. “Evaluation of Genetic Variation Contributing to Differences in Gene Expression Between Populations.” The American Journal of Human Genetics 82, no. 3 (March 3, 2008): 631–640.
You don't appreciate the cultural undertones of what is being said. I assume you will also like the following quote from the same government official in regard to ACTA: "We should never put copy rights ahead of human rights".
Now let me translate these statements for you:
"Gee, we did not realize that we can ask for bigger bribes. Now go back and stuff a little more cash into that envelope."
What happened is that being completely clueless about the dynamics of the issue, the government assumed this something that nobody cares about and going along with the flow will procure them some minor favors with the EU bureaucracies and the Bulgarian equivalents of RIAA. Because of the protests, they realized that this is actually a controversial issue, which provides them with a strong bargaining position as far as 'lobbyist' money are concerned.
Really? So if I run a Ponzi scheme and you cluelessly hand me your money, the government should stay away and not infringe on your right to get robbed?
This is a moronic summary of a stupid article.
This is not about FDA regulating your stem cells, it is about FDA regulating snake oil salesmen, before somebody gets hurt.
Some schmuck finds a loophole in the law that allows him to perform for profit untested medical procedures with questionable (to put it mildly) outcome. FDA has two options:
1. Ignore him and when somebody gets hurt get dragged to congress as a showpiece of a useless government bureaucracy.
2. Cover their bases and use all (no mater how questionable) authority that it can muster to try to shut him down.
Option one is a loosing proposition. Option two is a win-win no-matter how the court decides. If the court allows this to fly (unlikely) they win. If the court laughs at their arguments (more likely) they have covered their asses big time. Now they can turn to congress and say 'We have done what we can, it is your turn now to decide if this should be regulated'. In addition, at any point in the future when a similar situation pops up they are absolved from responsibility.
In 1992, the FDA declared that biotech foods were the same as conventional foods – because the biotech companies said so. The number 8 was then instituted since the produce industry thought consumers would prefer genetically modified food moreso than conventionally grown food. It did not take long for them to find out differently. Although the number 8 designation can still be found, it is rare. The biotech industry is also fighting any sort of labeling for their inventions – now that they know consumers really do not want them. As it stands now, Hawaiian papaya is about the only food you will find that has the number 8 in front of it.
Wow! These were the times, when we cared about chrome dioxide tapes. Then the CDs came bout and everything went downhill.
Seriously, this is one of the largest chemical companies in the world. you don't here about them, because they no longer market to consumers, at least in the US. But if you need 100 metric tons of a pigment, or a polymer, or any other chemical they are the guys to go to.
I feel like I'm watching a bunch of guys on horses making fun of the first automobiles. We're seeing the beginnings of the biggest revolution in medicine since antibiotics. This is going to be huge.
Sure, if you already know what you're sick with then a specific test for that condition will, in certain cases, be cheaper. But the point is you don't know.
You walk into the doctor's office with symptoms that could be cold, flu, the onset of bacterial pneumonia, etc. - and, in a few years, high throughput sequencing will tell you exactly which antibiotics/anitvirals (if any) to take.
Your car analogy is not very appropriate. To begin with I have been riding the automobile in question for couple of years, and its predecessors (microarrays) for about 10 years. You are completely missing the point that the problem here is not the amount of information that a doctor can potentially get from the full genome sequencing. The problem is that at the current state of the art we are unable to digest this information to a point where a doctor can act on it. The reason is that once you go beyond the simple Mendelian genetics, the interactions between different factors become exceedingly complex. You need to take into account multistate interactions of the genome sequence with epigenetic and environmental factors. In addition, having the genomic sequence will not solve your problem of not knowing what to look for. It will tell you even less about what kind of infection you have. In this case we don't really need to use the latest gadget to replace cheap, fast and reliable immunology tests? Kind of reminds me about the machine that says 'BING'.
As it stands now, doctors have more information that they can process. So if your are looking for a revolution that is just starting look at technologies for integrating large amounts of 'fuzzy' information from patient records, medical textbooks and literature, and various medical test to produce accurate diagnosis. Technologies like IBMs Watson and the NIH sponsored i2b2 is the next big thing in medical care.
You have a kid and when he's a few years old it becomes clear that he's got mild mental retardation. You want to know whether the obstetrician messed up during the birth, or your spouse dropped him on his head when you weren't around, or whether he got into the cleaning chemicals under the sink, or whether he got meningitis - or what. Well, if it's genetic, in a few years high throughput sequencing will be able to give you an answer.
You can get the answer if it is genetic now. So going back to the original comment: What are you and your doctor are going to do about it??
Yes, you bring your doctor a thumb drive with 3 billion base pairs of your genome, coding for 23,000 genes. Do you know what he says?
"What am I supposed to do with that?"
You hit the nail on the head. There is very little if any useful information for a doctor in full genome sequence, and most of it can be obtained with much cheaper genetic tests. ABI is ramping up the hype because they really need this instrument to be a good seller. Their first bet in the field was on a sequencing by ligation machine (SOLID) which did not sell very well.
Correction: It is not cheaper that current tech and will not increase assay density or performance. The only advantage over most current tests is that it can be used for continuous monitoring of ATP levels in living cells, but I can't find anything that substantiates their claim that it is not toxic. So nothing new here, move along.
Testing stuff in cell culture has been around since the beginning of the last century. Testing ATP levels as a proxy for cell viability is one of the oldest tricks in the book. It is pretty crude test too. These assays are used on a daily basis and are routinely automated to do millions of compounds per day using standard tech without any 'nano' buzzwords. Admittedly this sensor may increase the assay density so we can do even more drugs in a single run. However, it is not going to replace a single lab animal. We already test all drugs in cell culture before going into animals.
All these banks have very large US operations, and their branches in US are essentially US banks. What puzzles me is that our friendly makers of luxury sports cars from Bayerische Motoren Werke AG (aka BMW), for some reason got upwards of $4B. Admittedly they have a finance branch, but I thought the idea was to save a couple of critical banks not profitable car makers.
Slashdot Mirror
That would have been very clever if US marines were completely devoid of armor. Which is not the case so what exactly is your point?
For instance, a coffee drinker who also smokes may, on average, live longer than someone who smokes but doesn't drink coffee as well. Likewise for red meat, less exercise, etc.. .
This approach may be applicable for a study looking at factors, where we have a good idea how tho weight the contribution of each factor. The people who did the study not only did not to verify that the statements were true, they didn't even bother to follow up with the same question one more time while the study was running. How do they know that a snapshot they took back in 1996 was still true for the population in 2000, 2005 and 2008?
The NCI Office of Media Relations apparently were a little clueless on the facts they were reporting. The study actually finds that relatively elderly people (50 to 71) who said that they drink coffee (the question was asked once, actual coffee intake was never confirmed) were less like to die within a period of about 12 years. The study is garbage. Luckily the PR department's interpretation made it sound comical. Who says that PR departments are useless?
Currently there are amount 800 million people (a very impressive number!), but there is room for over 6 billion more. And those won't be joining MySpace, Google+ or Diaspora, they will join Facebook because that's where everyone is.
Last time I checked 800 million is way less than 6 billion (about 13% of 6 billion), which kind of contradicts the statement that 'that's where everyone is'
Working in investment industry, I ...
Oh is that where the fuzzy math comes from?
Before I reach for my wallet, could mister financial industry explain how facebook's revenue (around 1bilion) justifies the current valuation of 100 billion? Short of making every single living person on the planet a facebook member and then quadrupling their net income per user (currently at about $1) I don't see how any investment made now will break even in the next 5 years.
Yeah, that's what biologist spend their time on. Trying to figure out how to make bug deadlier to humans. I suggest we get rid of them scientist and go back to the good old small pox/black death/polyo days.
To assess whether current control measures may be effective against the H5 transmissible reassortant mutant virus, we examined the reactivity of sera from individuals vaccinated with an H5N1 prototype vaccine38 against a virus possessing the N158D/N224K/Q226L/T318I mutations in HA. We found that pooled human sera from individuals immunized with this vaccine reacted with the virus possessing the mutant H5 HA (N158D/N224K/Q226L/T318I) at a higher titre than with a wild-type H5 HA virus (VN1203/PR8; Supplementary Table 6), indicating that current H5N1 vaccines would be efficacious against the H5 transmissible reassortant mutant virus. In addition, the H5 transmissible reassortant mutant virus (HA(N158D/N224K/Q226L/T318I)/CA04) was highly susceptible to a licensed NA inhibitor, oseltamivir (Supplementary Table 7). These experiments show that appropriate control measures would be available to combat the transmissible virus described in this study.
Thanks for clearing this up. I missed the output per watt stats and I couldn't find any information about the directionality of the philips bulb. The Feit claims 180 degrees which is not bad. The color is important, but 3000K is not that much colder than 2700K especially when the bulb is bright (this of course is personal perception).
How is the Phillips $60 light bulb different than this $15 bulb?
Oh, and there are already complaints on the home depot site that it causes radio interference.
It is not that this cannot happen in science - more that the bad science will always eventually be revealed eventually. TFA only serves to reinforce this idea. Though it is a tragedy that these particular problem studies were so lacking in scientific rigor, it is reassuring that the peer review system ultimately brought them to light, even if it took some time to do so.
Unfortunately the peer review system did not bring them to light. If anything the peer review system of grants and publications reinforced the crappy science (look at table 1 in the article, the reproducible articles were actually referenced less). What brought it to light was that somebody (Amgen) spent tons of money and effort to reproduce the studies and went ahead to announce the aggregate negative data. I don't see the specific studies being quoted. From my contacts in the industry I hear this story all the time. I personally moved to the cancer research field 2 years ago and I spent most of my time since then trying to navigate between artifacts due to poorly controlled experiments and pure lies.
Having said that, I don't know of a good alternative to the peer review system. I would rather see peer review being enhanced with more open pre-publication access (like Arxiv) where more people can comment on data before it gets published.
Another approach is to get NIH to rethink the amount of 'grant overhead' - money that go to the institution instead of the researchers to cover things like utility bills and facilities maintenance. Right now it stands at 50% of the grant award ($250K R01 grant would pay the institution $125K), which is more than twice than the overhead non-for profit organizations allow on their grants (10-20%). That's a lot of money and it creates a 'business' where institutions will pressure researchers to compete for NIH funding at any cost so they can get more overhead. In some cases universities even borrow money to expand research space and recruit reserachers, again with the sole goal of getting more 'overhead'. This was sustainable while the NIH budget was expanding, but in the recent years the budget hasn't grown much, which has made the competition even more fierce. The incentive to publish anything so you can get grants has become enormous, because now the NIH grant money not only affect your ability to do research but also your job security entirely depends on it, as the university will kick you out very quickly if you don't bring in the NIH grants. In addition the large overhead eats money that can be spent directly on research thus allowing more thorough studies.
There is also the issue with the NIH mandate which is to cure disease. This is not bad in itself, unless you realize that NIH is the biggest game in town as far as biology research goes ($30B vs $7B for NSF, and NSF funds all kinds of research). So we throw this pile of money with the major goal of curing diseases (aka translation research), creating a disproportional incentive to bring 'practical' discoveries like drugs, therapies and diagnostic tests instead of understanding biological phenomena. The sad part is that the translational research derives from basic research and if you don't have a solid base all you can come up with is junk (do I need to explain the 'garbage in, garbage out' concept?).
Dear Roblimo, how stupid do you think the slashdot audience is? If you can't keep your ads apart from your stories, you probably need to find yourself a new audience. I would suggest moving to day time TV.
Can somebody explain to me why did these guys go to this conference? In my experience there are two reasons to go to a conference:
1. Business - meet people learn new things
2. Pleasure - screw the talks and go skying
This conference is in Paris of all places and if they don't care about the place and the talks why the hell did they go there. I am pretty sure every single one of the participants has better internet connection at home.
Yep, Sprint double dips into the data fee bucket. That's reason one why I am not renewing my 2 year contract with them. I am going to stick to my old android phone and the grandfathered data plan until one of them dies. Then I am going to switch to another carrier (not sure how this will work out because the only other alternative here is AT&T). The second reason I am not upgrading is that they are converting their network to LTE. I don't know how many of the phones they are selling now will be compatible with the new LTE network. My guess is none (motorola photon may be?). Can anyone enlighten me on this?
Honestly, after the ClearWire, LightSquare and MetroPCS debacles I am surprise that Sprint is still in business. Anybody that signs up for service with them right now must be out of their minds.
Ummm, the latter is exactly what evolution is. Mutations occur, the resulting changes are either propogated because they provide some objective benefit, removed from the system because they are detrimental, or become part of the background noise of genetic variation if they are neither harmful nor beneficial.
Ummm, I think the parent has it better than you. Evolution is about creating 'different' rather than 'objectively improved' organisms. A mutation can be fixed in the population not only trough natural selection, but also through genetic drift. So genetic variations that are neither harmful nor beneficial (aka neutral) can become the predominant genotype and not just 'noise'. In fact genetic drift will fix even 'objectively' disadvantageous mutations as long as they are not under strong negative selection (high cholesterol at later stages of life anyone?). Beside the separation of 'good' and 'bad' mutations is not clear cut, because it depends on the environment in which the organism lives. And as we know environments have the pesky tendency to change. Are mutations that give you sickle cell anemia good or bad? The answer is: depends on where you live. If you live in a place with endemic malaria, having a mutated copy of the beta-globin gene may come handy.
Free Program Predicts How Troublesome a Genetic Mutation Is
No it doesn't.
This is yet another case of how stupid PR does damage to otherwise good science. The original paper (not the PR release) describes a statistical model. The model tells you how likely it is for a mutation to affect splicing. According to ROC curve on figure 4 it isn't nearly as selective or sensitive as you need it to be for any clinical application. It is however a great research tool. The PR article makes another false assumption, by stating that mutations affecting the splicing of an exon invariably cause 'trouble'. In fact it is well established that there is a significant variability in exon usage in perfectly healthy humans (citations below).
1. Kwan, Tony, David Benovoy, Christel Dias, Scott Gurd, David Serre, Harry Zuzan, Tyson A. Clark, et al. “Heritability of Alternative Splicing in the Human Genome.” Genome Res. 17, no. 8 (August 1, 2007): 1210–1218.
2. Zhang, Wei, Shiwei Duan, Emily O. Kistner, Wasim K. Bleibel, R. Stephanie Huang, Tyson A. Clark, Tina X. Chen, et al. “Evaluation of Genetic Variation Contributing to Differences in Gene Expression Between Populations.” The American Journal of Human Genetics 82, no. 3 (March 3, 2008): 631–640.
You don't appreciate the cultural undertones of what is being said. I assume you will also like the following quote from the same government official in regard to ACTA: "We should never put copy rights ahead of human rights".
Now let me translate these statements for you: "Gee, we did not realize that we can ask for bigger bribes. Now go back and stuff a little more cash into that envelope."
What happened is that being completely clueless about the dynamics of the issue, the government assumed this something that nobody cares about and going along with the flow will procure them some minor favors with the EU bureaucracies and the Bulgarian equivalents of RIAA. Because of the protests, they realized that this is actually a controversial issue, which provides them with a strong bargaining position as far as 'lobbyist' money are concerned.
Really? So if I run a Ponzi scheme and you cluelessly hand me your money, the government should stay away and not infringe on your right to get robbed?
This is a moronic summary of a stupid article. This is not about FDA regulating your stem cells, it is about FDA regulating snake oil salesmen, before somebody gets hurt.
Some schmuck finds a loophole in the law that allows him to perform for profit untested medical procedures with questionable (to put it mildly) outcome. FDA has two options:
1. Ignore him and when somebody gets hurt get dragged to congress as a showpiece of a useless government bureaucracy.
2. Cover their bases and use all (no mater how questionable) authority that it can muster to try to shut him down.
Option one is a loosing proposition. Option two is a win-win no-matter how the court decides. If the court allows this to fly (unlikely) they win. If the court laughs at their arguments (more likely) they have covered their asses big time. Now they can turn to congress and say 'We have done what we can, it is your turn now to decide if this should be regulated'. In addition, at any point in the future when a similar situation pops up they are absolved from responsibility.
Can you build a Beowulf cluster if a B52 carpet bombs you with these?
In 1992, the FDA declared that biotech foods were the same as conventional foods – because the biotech companies said so. The number 8 was then instituted since the produce industry thought consumers would prefer genetically modified food moreso than conventionally grown food. It did not take long for them to find out differently. Although the number 8 designation can still be found, it is rare. The biotech industry is also fighting any sort of labeling for their inventions – now that they know consumers really do not want them. As it stands now, Hawaiian papaya is about the only food you will find that has the number 8 in front of it.
Wow! These were the times, when we cared about chrome dioxide tapes. Then the CDs came bout and everything went downhill. Seriously, this is one of the largest chemical companies in the world. you don't here about them, because they no longer market to consumers, at least in the US. But if you need 100 metric tons of a pigment, or a polymer, or any other chemical they are the guys to go to.
I feel like I'm watching a bunch of guys on horses making fun of the first automobiles. We're seeing the beginnings of the biggest revolution in medicine since antibiotics. This is going to be huge.
Sure, if you already know what you're sick with then a specific test for that condition will, in certain cases, be cheaper. But the point is you don't know.
You walk into the doctor's office with symptoms that could be cold, flu, the onset of bacterial pneumonia, etc. - and, in a few years, high throughput sequencing will tell you exactly which antibiotics/anitvirals (if any) to take.
Your car analogy is not very appropriate. To begin with I have been riding the automobile in question for couple of years, and its predecessors (microarrays) for about 10 years. You are completely missing the point that the problem here is not the amount of information that a doctor can potentially get from the full genome sequencing. The problem is that at the current state of the art we are unable to digest this information to a point where a doctor can act on it. The reason is that once you go beyond the simple Mendelian genetics, the interactions between different factors become exceedingly complex. You need to take into account multistate interactions of the genome sequence with epigenetic and environmental factors. In addition, having the genomic sequence will not solve your problem of not knowing what to look for. It will tell you even less about what kind of infection you have. In this case we don't really need to use the latest gadget to replace cheap, fast and reliable immunology tests? Kind of reminds me about the machine that says 'BING'.
As it stands now, doctors have more information that they can process. So if your are looking for a revolution that is just starting look at technologies for integrating large amounts of 'fuzzy' information from patient records, medical textbooks and literature, and various medical test to produce accurate diagnosis. Technologies like IBMs Watson and the NIH sponsored i2b2 is the next big thing in medical care.
You have a kid and when he's a few years old it becomes clear that he's got mild mental retardation. You want to know whether the obstetrician messed up during the birth, or your spouse dropped him on his head when you weren't around, or whether he got into the cleaning chemicals under the sink, or whether he got meningitis - or what. Well, if it's genetic, in a few years high throughput sequencing will be able to give you an answer.
You can get the answer if it is genetic now. So going back to the original comment: What are you and your doctor are going to do about it??
Yes, you bring your doctor a thumb drive with 3 billion base pairs of your genome, coding for 23,000 genes. Do you know what he says?
"What am I supposed to do with that?"
You hit the nail on the head. There is very little if any useful information for a doctor in full genome sequence, and most of it can be obtained with much cheaper genetic tests. ABI is ramping up the hype because they really need this instrument to be a good seller. Their first bet in the field was on a sequencing by ligation machine (SOLID) which did not sell very well.
Correction: It is not cheaper that current tech and will not increase assay density or performance. The only advantage over most current tests is that it can be used for continuous monitoring of ATP levels in living cells, but I can't find anything that substantiates their claim that it is not toxic. So nothing new here, move along.
Testing stuff in cell culture has been around since the beginning of the last century. Testing ATP levels as a proxy for cell viability is one of the oldest tricks in the book. It is pretty crude test too. These assays are used on a daily basis and are routinely automated to do millions of compounds per day using standard tech without any 'nano' buzzwords. Admittedly this sensor may increase the assay density so we can do even more drugs in a single run. However, it is not going to replace a single lab animal. We already test all drugs in cell culture before going into animals.
All these banks have very large US operations, and their branches in US are essentially US banks. What puzzles me is that our friendly makers of luxury sports cars from Bayerische Motoren Werke AG (aka BMW), for some reason got upwards of $4B. Admittedly they have a finance branch, but I thought the idea was to save a couple of critical banks not profitable car makers.