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BaseHealth was started by a former student of Davis’s. Its signature product, Genophen, sequences your genome (like many other companies do) but then uses a “risk engine”—a big data program that applies algorithms across medical, behavioral, and environmental information—to serve up a personalized set of behavior and treatment recommendations to accompany the genetic data about which diseases you have or are predisposed to get. Davis describes Genophen’s work as “rather breathtaking in its ambition.”
The ultimate goal, Diaz says, is to bring that cost down even further and to get this kind of testing covered by insurance companies so that it can be adopted on a much wider scale. At the time of his treatment, Lukas Wartman was able to have his cancer sequenced only because his university had a slew of sequencing machines that his colleagues could use free of charge.
So everyone who wants it, certainly in the developing world, could have his or her genome sequenced.”
PIG LUNGS AND WOOLLY MAMMOTHS
Venter, the second of four kids, grew up in working-class San Francisco. Impatience-in-overdrive has always characterized his personality. He was both motivated and easily bored as a kid, setting records on his high school swim team but almost flunking out with bad grades. And as an NIH scientist working on the Human Genome Project, Venter pieced together a faster way of harvesting information about a person’s genome.
In response, Venter resigned and started a company to compete with the Human Genome Project.
Synthetic Genomics, announced a project in 2014 that aims to genetically engineer pigs with organs that can be safely transplanted into human beings.
xenotransplantation,
Venter’s second genomics company is even more audacious. Human Longevity, Inc. (HLI) aspires to use genetic data to dial back the effects of aging. “Aging Is the Single Biggest Risk Factor for Virtually Every Significant Human Disease”
As incredible as Venter and Diamandis’s goals may be, they’re making rapid and impressive progress. HLI has recently lined up some of the best medical partners in the world, including PGDx. It raised $70 million in venture capital, and after only eight months of existence, it is now, according to one of its investors and board members, the world’s largest whole-genome sequencing center.
As Revive & Restore sees it, the well-preserved DNA of many extinct animals can bring these animals back to life. As with the bucardo, this means finding the most genetically similar animal and implanting it with the extinct animal’s embryo.
Efforts are already under way to “deextinct” the carrier pigeon, the health hen, and an Australian frog most notable for giving birth through its mouth.
Species often become extinct for a reason. Reintroducing them will change food chains and could introduce viruses and bacteria that nature has not adapted to contain. As our ability to manipulate life grows stronger, it needs to be governed by our human judgment.
KEEPING UP WITH THE GENOMIC JONESES
The main reason the United States is ahead today is that leading international scientists are still clamoring to join American universities. Among the world’s most highly cited scientists, one in eight were born in developing countries, but 80 percent of them now live in developed countries.
Perhaps no other R&D project has unleashed more scientific knowledge during my lifetime than the Human Genome Project, which brought in scientists from around the world—Australian, British, and French citizens were on the NIH team. These were scientists from familiar, reputable universities. But when Bill Clinton announced the draft human genome, he was also careful to credit a group that had contributed only about 1 percent of the sequencing: the Beijing Genomic Institute.
BGI) is now the largest genomic research center in the world, with more sequencing machines than the entire United States. Some of its researchers are in early discussions about eventually sequencing the genomes of almost every child in China.
Since 1998, the share of China’s economy devoted to research and development has tripled. While the portion of global research and development (R&D) in the United States fell from 37 percent to 30 percent in the past decade, China’s share of global R&D increased from about 2 percent to 14.5 percent. With nearly 2 percent of China’s mammoth GDP going toward R&D, it now has the statistical edge over Europe, and the United States is struggling to retain its lead.
The United States is the second-largest producer of science and engineering academic articles (if you count the 28-country European Union as a single bloc), contributing a quarter of the world’s output. But the US numbers have been declining over the past decade. Meanwhile, China’s output has been skyrocketing—from 3 to 11 percent
One Chinese CEO told me he believes that the wealth and power that came from being the center of the Internet’s commercialization extended America’s reign as a superpower by ten years.
Today BGI’s revenues come from a variety of sources, though they are difficult to verify. One large category of revenue is “anonymous donations.” Other sources include providing data analysis to pharmaceutical companies, sequencing genomes for researchers and individuals, and money that is reported from municipal and federal government institutions. BGI also benefits from the low labor costs of its thousands of employees who, on average, earn only about $1,500 a month.
Craig Venter, resigned to establish a company to compete with it. I also think that the more capital that floods into basic research in genomics, the faster we’ll see results that benefit people all over the world.
The top scientists from India, Latin America, and elsewhere tend to end up at US universities or companies even if they remain physically based in their home countries.
While the Soviet system produced huge numbers of Soviet scientists, their work was driven by the government’s political and military priorities. The great space race resulted in major developments in both the United States and the Soviet Union, but at the same time, the Soviet Union’s scientific endeavors were hobbled by the regime’s ideology.
In Lysenko’s scientific view, if you plucked all the leaves off a tree, the next generation of trees would also be leafless, a remarkably Marxist-Leninist approach to science. Lysenko convinced the Soviet Agriculture Academy that the study of genetics was bad for the country and the cause, so schools removed any references to genetics in their books and curriculum. Soviet scientists learned to fall in line, publishing articles with absurd results that echoed Lysenko’s theories.
The lack of any meaningful activity in the field of genomics in Russia today dates back to Lysenko. His views were codified under Soviet law in 1948, and Mendelian genetics did not reenter Russian scientific curricula until years after Lysenko’s death in the 1970s. The first “ethnically Russian” genome was not sequenced until 2010, using equipment purchased from the United States and BGI.
As the Craig Venters of the world race toward cutting-edge breakthroughs, others are seeking to harness the burgeoning telecommunications infrastructure in the developing world to deliver everyday health care needs better.
Delivery of medical services will never be equal, but pioneering initiatives to expand access to care across socioeconomic lines are beginning to take hold and improve lives on a huge scale.
During my travels through Africa and low-income areas of Southeast Asia, I have seen mobile phone-based programs that have proven to be effective for a range of health-related interventions, including diagnosis, disease monitoring and compliance, expert assistance for community health care workers, and programs to promote education and awareness.
And they can allow phones to connect wirelessly to devices like blood pressure monitors, electrocardiographs, and other sensors. A mobile phone cannot sequence someone’s genome yet, but it can be used to take a blood sample and transmit the data to a lab on the other side of the world.
I got to know 27-year-old Medic Mobile CEO Josh Nesbit while we were in a jungle in Colombia, in the last stronghold of the FARC guerrillas. Josh was a mobile expert we had brought in for a State Department program with the Colombian military, and he was educating local stakeholders about how mobile devices could be used to map land mines in the area and reduce the loss of life and limb.
The World Health Organization estimates a shortage of 4.3 million health care workers in 57 countries in the developing world, 36 of them in Africa. Meanwhile, mobile telecommunications have covered most of the continent. Josh made the connection and decided that leveraging this mobile infrastructure would be the founding goal of Medic Mobile.
There will be vaccines for malaria, cholera, and other deadly diseases, and mobile technologies will play a critical role in distributing them to everyone.”
To address the doctor deficit, Shimba too decided to take advantage of mobile, since 93 percent of Kenyans are mobile phone users. The app has a symptom checker, first aid information, doctor directories, a hospital locator, and alert systems. In a country with vast rural areas and tenuous access to care, MedAfrica offers a new way for any Kenyan with a mobile phone to get some form of health care, pairing medical expertise with villagers all over the country.
With 78 organs, 206 bones, and 640 muscles, not to mention up to 25,000 genes, our bodies are complicated machines.
Most health insurance companies pay around $170 for a mammogram, and uninsured women pay an average of $102. By having low-cost subject experts filter normal scans, we could see these costs decline.
EVERYTHING WE KNOW ABOUT THE LIFE SCIENCES IS GOING TO CHANGE
Dr. Davis was right. Where we are today with genomics is the equivalent of where we were in 1994 at the advent of the commercial Internet. Genomics is going to have a bigger impact on our health than any single innovation of the 20th century.
The first beneficiaries of the innovations will be blueberry-eating billionaires, but the process for mainstreaming these advances within and across societies will likely only take 20 years, well within the life span of most of the people reading this book.
Genomics will become a trillion-dollar industry, extending lives and nearly eliminating diseases that kill hundreds of thousands of people a year today.
Is there an algorithm for trust? New ways to exchange are forcing a rewrite of the compact between corporation, citizen, and government.
Like many other adults, when I went to college, I got my first credit card. When I began to travel, I took traveler’s checks along with me. ATMs—invented in the late 1960s but not popularized until the 1980s—allowed us to bypass the bank teller to access our cash.
Today digital banking has become nearly universal in developed economies, as has mobile banking, with the ubiquity of cell phones.
But the code-ification of money, markets, payments, and trust is the next big inflection point in the history of financial services. Understanding what it means for you and your business will be important regardless of whether you are a plumber or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
Jack, CEO of Square and CEO of Twitter as of this writing, is a true visionary.
With Square, Jack’s original insight was to invent a way to make everyday payments using a device that is growing even more precious than our wallets: our mobile phones.
Every morning before I walk out the door, I pat myself down to make sure that I haven’t forgotten the three most important things I need to make it through the day. My wallet goes in my back left pocket. Keys go in the front right. The front left is reserved for my phone. Jack wants to make it so you can leave the wallet at home.
The company made world-class glass faucets, but that wasn’t enough to prevent Jim from losing a $2,000 sale because he did not have the technology to accept an American Express credit card.
gateway monthly payment
The second category comprises the fees paid directly to credit card companies.
