Genetic Code Could Hold Key to Medical Fate

Oct. 22, 2007 — -- The world as we know it is going to change, and in all likelihood, the folks working at the intersection of technology, genetics and biology will be responsible for it.

The products and technologies emerging from research conducted at the vortex of those previously separate fields will have an impact on how we travel, heat our homes, keep disease at bay and age, what we spend on health care and probably how we think about our investment portfolios.

Speaking at the recent Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, J. Craig Venter, founder and CEO of Synthetic Genomics and a pioneer and victor in the race to sequence the most complete human genome, offered a stunning commentary on where the world is going and how quickly we're going to get there.

Crowd reactions ranged from "exhilarating" to "creepy" to "huh?" as Venter spoke of progress and the necessity of aggressively pushing this research forward.

Both in the lab and in the field (in this case a much-chronicled round-the-world ocean voyage to collect and analyze sea water), Venter and his team have gathered vast quantities of data in the search for answers to critical life questions. Like breakthrough work in other fields, these explorers have discovered that most of what we thought we knew before, in this case about the genetic makeup of life, was wrong.

One example: Before Venter's work, scientists believed that the differences in the genetic makeup of individuals was a very small fraction of a percent.

But the team discovered that the differences among individuals are substantially greater than that, as much as 1 to 2 percent. These differences are expressed as millions of variations on a theme, differing by the DNA in our genes, the number of copies of our genes, the alignment of the DNA/genes in or on those chromosomes.

The more we understand our genetic makeup and our differences, the more we can in time do something about our futures.