India Opens Bioinformatics Facility

On Friday, India will open a new medical bioinformatics operation in Hyderabad.

The facility will be run by Andra Pradesh Center for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics and Sun Microsystems, which has provided $4 million of the $5 million investment for the facility.

The center seeks to create a database on infectious diseases and genetic disorders, focusing on tuberculosis for application in drug discovery and gene therapy.

Scientist bloggers are few, but growing, according to a feature in the current issue of The Scientist. The article runs down the current state of the blogosphere in biology and provides a list of some related blogs.

Francine Hardaway of Stealthmode Partners, published online by Always On, blogs a recent presentation by grumpy futurist George Gilder [paraphrasing George]:

The interplay of biology and physics is the major innovation that’s happening today. It’s a transition from an industry dominated by three abundances: power, silicon, and transistors to one dominated by scarcity of those resources. We are going from analog to digital and back to analog. Optics engineers are analog engineers, as are bioengineers.