Monday News Briefs

From Pennsylvania and Maryland, a short announcement of a summer-camp experience for girls – a weeklong sleepaway science camp on molecular biology to be held at Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pa. The camp costs $225 and requires the submission of letters of support from science teachers and grade reports. Deadline is June 30. For more information, see the article in the Herald-Mail Online newspaper.

From India's Deccan Herald newspaper in southern India, a center for India's software industry and an emerging hub for biotechnology, comes coverage of a recent conference there on DNA sequencing and an update on the trend to developing technology that can produce a scan of the human genome for under $1,000. This is an important aspect of the larger concept of personalized medicine, which will be based on obtaining foundational knowledge of the individualized differences in your genetic blueprint (your genome). This will inform doctors about your genetic proclivity for disease and how your body can utilize a drug or drugs. According to coverage online, speakers at the conference said the $1,000 genome scan may be as near as five years away -- a very optimistic scenario. See the article.

On the Fight Aging website, a posting on open-source biology or, as the poster calls it, 'garage biotechnology'. Whatever the name, this is about the application to biological investigation the open-source concepts that have propelled software development. In this paradigm, intellectual property protection does not go out the window. The software industry is learning how to share and protect intellectual property to sustain a business, while at the same time, making available to a larger collective effort, the tools needed to advance the field. Visionaries hope that this can accelerate biological investigation and, eventually, have an impact on healthcare.