It's worth noting that everything - from the Internet to electric cars, genomic sequencing, mobile apps, and social media - were pioneered by startups, not existing companies.
The ever quickening advances of science made possible by the success of the Human Genome Project will also soon let us see the essences of mental disease. Only after we understand them at the genetic level can we rationally seek out appropriate therapies for such illnesses as schizophrenia and bipolar disease.
We are still working with an incomplete compass. The time is right to bring the full power of genomics to bear on the problem of cancer.
In 15 years we'll have all the sequence, a list of the genes everyone has in common and those that differ among people. We know only something like a tenth of 1 percent of the sequence at the moment.
Just as computer technology and the Internet created whole new industries and extraordinary benefits for people that extend into almost every realm of human endeavor from education to transportation to medicine, genetics will undoubtedly benefit people everywhere in ways we can't even imagine but know will surely occur.
Solutions to all biological problems are greatly advanced by the sequencing work and the new tools that are created.
We should have lifelong monitoring of our vital signs that predict things like skin or pancreatic cancer so we can eradicate it. We should have personalized medicine; there's a huge amount of innovation possible.
If I could get every single cancer genome sequence that has been sequenced; if I could ever put it in one repository, we have the capacity to do a million billion calculations per second. We'll be able to find out more in 10 minutes more than it would take 10 Nobel laureates 10 years to find out about the patterns of cancer and the cures for cancer.
Once we all have our genomes, some of these extremely rare diseases are going to be totally predictable.
Being the first FDA-authorized direct-to-consumer genetic test out there is revolutionary.
I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about genetic information and what you can and cannot learn.
The goal of getting your genome done is not to tell you what you will die from, but it's how to learn how to take action to prevent disease.
Say you have cancer - you have this broad thing we call cancer; we're going to irradiate you and pump this poisonous material into you and hope more of the bad stuff dies than the good. That is going to seem so medieval when we can fix it on a genetic level, and Foundation Medicine is the first step to diagnosing it on a genetic level.
