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Cost of Decoding a Genome Is Lowered
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| Dr. Quake calculates that the most recently sequenced human genome cost
| $250,000 to decode, and that his machine brings the cost to less than a fifth
| of that.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/science/11gene.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
Poverty Kills
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| Bangladesh, 1974. Food per person was at an all-time high â it was a peak
| year in rice output and availability. It was also a peak year for starvation.
| 100,000 people starved to death, their skin cracking and their tissues
| breaking down. They were unable even to focus their eyes as the world watched
| on TV. Another million and a half died from starvationâs secondary effects.
| Another half-a-million died after the famine was over because their bodies
| had been made so weak. There was plenty of food to feed them. They starved
| because they were too poor to afford it.
|
| [...]
|
| Mortality resolves a number of long-standing technical debates about the
| right way to measure poverty. In the US we calculate poverty by having
| experts at the Department of Agriculture figure out the cheapest products on
| sale in America that could meet minimal nutritional requirements. They add up
| how much they cost and multiply by three. People with less than that are
| defined as poor. Can the poor really follow that minimal diet in practice?
| How do you even decide what minimal nutritional requirements are? Why three?
| The answer is simple: just count deaths instead.
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http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/povertykills
Recent:
Patenting the Barcode of Life
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| DNA barcoding is such a powerful idea that the parasites have moved in, and
| started trying to *patent* bits of the idea:
|
|
| Â Â Systematic and phylogenetics, indeed much of evolutionary science, has
| Â Â long and great tradition of making resources and knowledge freely
| Â Â available to other resources. Instead of cash, all an author asks for is
| Â Â a citation or a credit. Therefore, it sounded incredulous to me that one
| Â Â researcher was trying to patent a DNA barcode snippet for a plant gene
| Â Â that was being worked on over several years by a large group of
| Â Â researchers.
|
|
| It's a classic situation: not only are scientific techniques being patented,
| they are techniques that are well established and have been used for years -
| something that is explicitly excluded even in the most deranged patent
| regimes. And people say the system is working just fine...
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http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2009/08/patenting-barcode-of-life.html
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