genomic medicine

Who owns our genomic data? This question began a panel discussion titled “When People Share Their Genome on Facebook” at the second annual Beyond Sequencing conference in San Francisco Tuesday. The panel was led by Bio-IT World’s editor-in-chief, Kevin Davies, author of The $1,000 Genome. Another panelist, Dr. Pilar Ossorio, quickly deflected the question saying “it’s not a matter of ownership.” She posed another question, could a representation of one’s genomic data be copyrighted? According to Dr.

This week I attended the 3rd annual World Conference for Personalized Medicine held at Microsoft’s Computer Science Museum in Mountain View, California. A museum for the history of computing seemed appropriate for a new industry which has been dramatically impacted by the accelerating pace of technological innovation. The most oft quoted theme in the conference: that the price of sequencing an entire genome has dropped at breathtaking speed over the last few years. Just four years ago, the price for a genome sequence hovered in the tens of millions of dollars.