Gigaom AI Minute – January 17

Transcript

When the genome was first sequenced, there was a great deal of excitement and hope that the mysteries of life and disease would be unlocked in a profound way. And while we have had many steps of progress along the way, the massive breakthroughs have been slow in coming.

We wanted there to be a single gene for individual traits, like for intelligence or alcoholism, but it turns out it isn't that simple. There's epigenetics, the way your genome changes over your life based on your environment. There's the interplay between different genes.

But if you look at it not as a biological problem but as a big data problem, then you see that your genome is really just 600 or so meg of pure data. If we had just a few million genomes and consistent medical information on those individuals, there would be this amazing convergence. We would use artificial intelligence to understand the interplay of all of the factors, and CRISPR-Cas9 as a way to modify the genome, then we are really off to the races.