Gigaom AI Minute – October 21

Transcript

When the genome was first sequenced, it was hoped that we would find a gene for smartness, a gene for alcoholism, a gene for cancer, and so forth, but it didn't turn out that way. You have 23 pairs of chromosomes. Perhaps 20,000 protein-encoding genes and they're made up of three billion base pairs. That is your DNA. Every cell in your body, excluding your red blood cells, has an entire copy of your DNA. Each strand of which is one molecule wide and six feet long. All together it would stretch all the way to Pluto if you totaled up all the DNA in your body.

But, if you start to think about genomics as a data science and not a biological science, you realize that every one of your cells actually holds 728 megabytes of data. Studying that data and how it varies between people, that is an ideal task of machine learning. So it seems that machine learning came along just when we have a kind of biological data science problem that we need it to solve.