Inside the drive to collect DNA from 1 million veterans and revolutionize medicine

Posted on November 11, 2015December 11, 2021 by Matt Kristoffersen

STAT, November 11, 2015

“This is our brand new freezer,” Don Humphries said. “It holds 4 million vials.”

You’d think a freezer big enough to hold 4 million vials of blood would be easy to spot. But to my great embarrassment, I couldn’t see it.

Humphries and I were standing in a lab in the basement of the Veterans Affairs hospital in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. He had led me through a labyrinth of windowless rooms, packed with robots handling tubes of blood donated from veterans, pipes roaring with coolant, and gorilla-sized tanks of liquid nitrogen, until he stopped next to a featureless wall.

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Geneticist Craig Venter helped sequence the human genome. Now he wants yours

Posted on November 5, 2015December 11, 2021 by Matt Kristoffersen

STAT, November 5, 2015

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If you enter Health Nucleus, a new facility in San Diego cofounded by J. Craig Venter, one of the world’s best-known living scientists, you will get a telling glimpse into the state of medical science in 2015.

Your entire genome will be sequenced with extraordinary resolution and accuracy. Your body will be scanned in fine, three-dimensional detail. Thousands of compounds in your blood will be measured. Even the microbes that live inside you will be surveyed. You will get a custom-made iPad app to navigate data about yourself. Also, your wallet will be at least $25,000 lighter.

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More Than Half of Entire Species of Saigas Gone in Mysterious Die-Off

Posted on November 2, 2015May 28, 2020 by admin

The New York Times, November 2, 2015

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A mysterious die-off of endangered antelopes last spring in Central Asia was even more extensive than originally thought, killing more than half of the entire species in less than a month, scientists have found.

“I’ve worked in wildlife disease all my life, and I thought I’d seen some pretty grim things,” Richard A. Kock, of the Royal Veterinary College in London, said in a telephone interview. “But this takes the biscuit.”

At a scientific meeting last week in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, Dr. Kock and his colleagues reported that they had narrowed down the possible culprits.

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