This is the fourth in a series of high-level posts reviewing foundational concepts and technologies in genomics. The first three were: “How Many Genes Does a Person Have,” “How do Genomes Vary, Person to Person,” and “Sanger Sequencing.” This one is about high throughput DNA…
I’ve heard from several independent consultants lately that prospective clients are pressuring them to cut rates and justifying it with the old fallacy about how your hourly rate should just be your annual salary divided by 2,000 working hours per year. I have written about…
More than 20 years ago, fresh out of school in the 90s, I built artificial intelligence (AI) systems for a military contractor. I trained neural nets, used natural language processing to populate decision support systems, experimented with genetic algorithms, and refined support vector machines. In…
This is the third post in a series reviewing basic concepts in genomics. The first one was titled “How Many Genes Does a Person Have?” and the second was “How do Genomes Vary, Person to Person?” This is a breezy summary of the Sanger method…
This is the second post in a series where I review and explore some basic concepts and confounders in genomics. The first one was titled “How Many Genes Does a Person Have?” Until quite recently, genetic variation was described in terms of difference from a…
Somebody recently asked me, innocently enough, “how many genes are there in the human genome?” As one does in these situations, I answered a slightly different question: We are made up of about 20,000 unique proteins. This sufficed to move the conversation along, but I…
If Somerville’s city council tries to make moderate cuts to the police budget this year, the Mayor will respond by defunding the crossing guards. He’ll blame the council for making him do it. It’s classic bullying and budgetary hostage taking and it sucks. In order…
My mother used to tell stories about the 1967 race riots in Detroit. She was 17 years old, living with her parents at 7 mile and Woodward. She told me how the National Guard rolled tanks down the street while her grandfather hid in the…
Please remember, as you decide how to act in the coming days and weeks: We are not re-opening because we beat the virus. There is not adequate testing. There is no vaccine. There is no demonstrated treatment or cure. From a medical perspective, we are…
I’ll be honest, I don’t want to go back to the “normal” we had in February. I was killing myself with business travel. It was a slow sort of killing … but killing nonetheless. I was on a train most weeks and a plane most…