This is pretty embarrassing, frankly. Because once g3ene sequencing gets cheap, the money is not in sequencing different species, but in differential genomics on the same species.In the US genomics is friven by the hope of multibillion dollar drug discovery revenues or patents because of this idiot direct-to-consumer marketing of pharmaceuticals. In no other country do I know of so much money spent on selling products to people who are unqualified to buy them. Meantime the real (commercial and scientific) prize of individualized diagnostics and treatment is being ignored.
I'm not sure why you think there is little research on personalized medicine in the US? There is tons. It's just turning out to be much more difficult than was originally hoped (see: results from GWAS studies, etc.).
Sorry, I was unclear. What I meant was that we don't seem to be going all-in on it like the Chinese are. I don't think we can do personalized medicine now, because we don't have sufficiently large sample sets for comparison or sufficiently fast comparators. And i know there is a lot of research going on to improve that, but don't feel we are being sufficiently aggressive about it.
"“BGI has scaled up very impressively,” says Eric Lander, director of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which operates the largest academic DNA sequencing center in the United States. “But I think that absolute scale is much less important than what you do with it.”"
Why wouldn't those 4000 people would figure out what to do with the data? Surely without the data it's hard to even get started?
