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Exponential Change
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James Watson, codiscoverer of the structure of DNA, now has a copy of his very own genome. Will you be next? On Thursday, James Watson was handed a DVD containing his entire genome, sequenced in the past few months by 454, a company based in Branford, CT, that's developing next-generation technologies for efficiently reading the genome. At a cost of $2 million, 454 sequenced Watson's genome for roughly an order of magnitude less than it would have cost using traditional machines. While this is still too expensive for the average Joe, experts say that the advance marks a major milestone toward personal-genome sequencing--and more-personalized medicine--for all.
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A new study that estimates how much digital information the world is generating (hint: a lot) finds that for the first time, there's not enough storage space to hold it all. Good thing we delete some stuff.
The report, assembled by the technology research firm IDC, sought to account for all the ones and zeros that make up photos, videos, e-mails, web pages, instant messages, phone calls and other digital content zipping around. The researchers also assumed that on average, each digital file gets replicated three times.
Add it all up and IDC determined that the world generated 161 billion gigabytes - 161 exabytes - of digital information last year.
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Dickerson's Law. In 1977, Richard Dickerson, professor of physical chemistry at Caltech, noted that solved protein crystal structures had risen from one in 1961 to 23. He published a simple exponential formula which predicted that by March 2001, scientists would have solved 3-D structures for more than 12,000 proteins. He was only 57 short of the actual number.
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We now have a large and growing number of sequenced genomes. It is widely understood that this presents research opportunities and promises to change the way biology advances, but the magnitude and nature of the opportunities is, for the most part, poorly understood. In this short piece, I wish to examine the following two questions: First, how quickly will sequence data be produced? Second, what impact will this have on our understanding of the sequenced organisms?
Since I am a computer scientist by training, I tend to think of the current situation in which the field of genomics is being driven forward by rapid technological advances as quite analogous to the sequence of events in computing that were triggered by advances in microcomputer and network technologies.
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The dark-blue plot indicates the Kurzweil/Moore's Law108: it describes the doubling of computer instructions per second per US dollar (IPS/US $) that has been occurring approximately every 18 months since 1900. The magenta plot indicates an exponential growth in the number of base pairs of accurate DNA sequence per unit cost (bp/US $) as a function of time1. To some extent, the doubling time for DNA mimics the IPS/US $ curve because it is dependent on it.
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Some of you may have already seen a presentation floating around with a lot of WOW statistics about China and India and technology. If not, you can view it here: http://www.glumbert.com/media/shift
We're told that China has more honor students than the US has students, has the largest English-speaking population in the world.
It gets even spookier when they get into technology. 106 million users of MySpace would be the 11th largest country in the world.
How about 1.5 exabytes of new information generation this year, or fiber optics that can transmit 10 trillion bits per second, and tripling every 6 months?
I don't believe it. According to these kinds of predictions twenty years ago, we were supposed to robots now. Where is my robot?
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