As chairwoman of the inaugural IEEE Computer Society Bioinformatics Conference, held at Stanford University last week, Vicky Markstein is trying to recruit the leading minds of computer science into what she calls “the industrial revolution of biology,” an anticipated period of discovery resulting from the analysis of genomic information.
Computer scientists will be essential for deriving useful knowledge from the large databases of genomic data that have recently become available,… read more

Forbes profiles eight visionaries in information technology for medicine.

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Scientists think they have found the first of many genes that gave humans speech. The gene, FOXP2, is thought to be linked to an ability to control facial movements — a faculty crucial to language, which would give bearers a survival advantage because they were able to communicate more clearly.

An upsurge in autism cases diagnosed in the Silicon Valley area of California may be due to genes more common in its high-tech workers, researchers believe. They speculate that “computer geeks” may, while not fully autistic themselves, may be carrying genes that contribute to it and are more likely to meet partners who also carry autistic genes, raising the chances of children with the full-blown condition.

J. Craig Venter plans to build what he believes will be the nation’s largest genome sequencing center to introduce new technology that vastly decreases the time and cost required to determine the DNA code of people, animals and microbes.

One goal, he said, is to get the cost down to $2,000 to $3,000 to analyze a person’s entire genome, compared with the hundreds of millions of dollars it took… read more