Wednesday, June 25, 2008

454 anew......It's been 1 year


"To advance science all one has to do is say Yes" That came out of the mouth of Jonathan Rothberg at Baylor College of Medicine, describing what Jim Watson said to him when they decided to sequence his entire genome.


It has been 13 months since the man was given a special DVD....no not that kind....the kind with a His Genome on it.....

What motivated Jim to say Yes? What motivated Jonathan to create 454? Personal events always do.....

Jonathan, it turns out, was motivated by his son's secondary apnea event at birth. 454 revolutionized gene sequencing and genome sequencing. 454 used water droplets in an oil emulsion to create "test tubes" for PCR. Imagine the crazy amount of droplets that could be created to concurrently do PCR!!!! 30 cycles per time........billions of base pairs.......
24 billion at first.....In the case of Jim Watson!

Did I tell you 24 is my magic number? One can only imagine the
epigenetic changes!!!

I am writing today to tell you how amazing it was to meet Jonathan in person. I had posted on him in the past and even about his
Vinyard Chamard. Why is it that all my genetics heroes are tall???? Francis, Jonathan, Rick, Lynch, I could go on and on.....Well at least Ken Offit is as tall as I am.

Well, it turns out that Jim's genome WAS the first available online, in addition before genetics Jonathan was a proteomics guy.....Guess what?....That will soon come back around. I enjoyed my time with the Yale Alum and YNHH born prodigy.......I too was born at YNHH....I look forward to the day when I can have an institute, sell my company to Roche, sell my other company to Standard and Poor's, Create a stonehenge like clock with my children's' birth dates....I could go on and on, but you can check it out at his LinkedIn page!


He gave me some very sage advice and guidance.....It truly is amazing when you begin to appreciate all the people he has helped along the way. I hope to do the same.....someday.

This afternoon I plan to announce some major news.......While you wait
chew on this
Stay Tuned!!!

4 comments:

Andrew said...

Ah ha! So Ion Torrents is Jonathan Rothberg! Ion Torrents job advertisements appear in my Gmail AdSense all the time.

Honestly, clicked on an ad once and at first glance I thought the site was spam.

Anonymous said...

I tried to Google his company name (looking for the website) and it screams scam.

Steve Murphy MD said...

Are you guys serious????
The smart businessman doesn't spend 10,000 on his website. Especially when you have the goods to offer....If it sells itself, don't waste money selling it

Come on, this guys is a legend...not a scam artist...
Just b/c the website is not "Navigenics" worthy.....You guys are harsh....What do you say about Helix's site?

-Steve

Anonymous said...

The Helix website is fine. You (not you personally) need to look at it in the consumer eye. When I come across a company name that I have never heard before, I want to look at the website to learn about it. That is the first place a person now looks for information about a business, and a person. When I typed in his company name in a Google search, I found a website was poorly done. The website has a "scam" appeal to it.