Scientific MOOCs follower. Author of Airpocalypse, a techno-medical thriller (Out Summer 2017)


Welcome to the digital era of biology (and to this modest blog I started in early 2005).

To cure many diseases, like cancer or cystic fibrosis, we will need to target genes (mutations, for ex.), not organs! I am convinced that the future of replacement medicine (organ transplant) is genomics (the science of the human genome). In 10 years we will be replacing (modifying) genes; not organs!


Anticipating the $100 genome era and the P4™ medicine revolution. P4 Medicine (Predictive, Personalized, Preventive, & Participatory): Catalyzing a Revolution from Reactive to Proactive Medicine.


I am an early adopter of scientific MOOCs. I've earned myself four MIT digital diplomas: 7.00x, 7.28x1, 7.28.x2 and 7QBWx. Instructor of 7.00x: Eric Lander PhD.

Upcoming books: Airpocalypse, a medical thriller (action taking place in Beijing) 2017; Jesus CRISPR Superstar, a sci-fi -- French title: La Passion du CRISPR (2018).

I love Genomics. Would you rather donate your data, or... your vital organs? Imagine all the people sharing their data...

Audio files on this blog are Windows files ; if you have a Mac, you might want to use VLC (http://www.videolan.org) to read them.

Concernant les fichiers son ou audio (audio files) sur ce blog : ce sont des fichiers Windows ; pour les lire sur Mac, il faut les ouvrir avec VLC (http://www.videolan.org).


Patients sacrifiés ; non soignés : les médecins et dentistes français ne s'occupent pas de génétique



"Homo Possessus" -- Genomic Entertainment

Do we own our own body (and genes and organs?) A book series about people and who owns them. This page is aimed at knowledge sharing for all and by all, so your contribution is welcome and wanted!

I'm a writer with a MIT certificate in genomics. I'm working on a book series + musical about people and who owns them, about cyberpunks, bio hackers, DIY Bio. Digital devices, sensors, big and small data, genomics, 3D printing, bioengineering, organ replacement technologies (and donation and trafficking): what do WE THE PEOPLE have to say about this?

Facebook fan page: https://www.facebook.com/possessus

I'm feeling honored!

@MichaelJMoritz










One-Size-Fits-All Medicine VS "Genomic" Precision Medicine

Silicone (Condom) Valley: Is Big Data The Next STD?




rip, brain death - Repose en paix, mort encéphalique



A crowd-funded project wants to create the world's first virtual lifeform from scratch

@OpenWorm

SolveBio: "We're at an inflection point of software intersecting with biology"

https://www.solvebio.com


Migrating Your Bank In Your Genome

"HOMO POSSESSUS"

"Scan materials or physical objects. A Pocket Molecular Sensor For All!"

Documenting all the way from Organ Donation to CRISPR genome-editing tool...


Follow the author of this blog on Twitter!

@cathcoste








 

"Suspended Animation Goes Primetime: Say Goodbye To Death As We Know It"




http://singularityhub.com/2014/05/27/suspended-animation-goes-primetime-say-goodbye-to-death-as-we-know-it/
"But advances in neuroscience, ideas about brain death,rain death, and the introduction of mechanical ventilators—with their ability to keep the heart pumping long after the brain had died—forced a society-wide reevaluation of  terms."(source)

"At issue were irreversible comas and the tricky legalities of organ harvesting (i.e. when is someone dead enough that we can borrow their kidneys to give to someone more alive and in need, but not too dead that those kidneys stop working). And it was just this issue that brought together an ad hoc committee at Harvard Medical School in 1968. In an effort to come up with a hard and practical definition of 'irreversible coma,' the committee also established 'brain death' as the best proof of life’s end.
The Harvard criteria spread from there, effectively becoming the accepted definition the world over. But once again, not so fast.
Back in 2002, researchers at the University of Michigan Hospital in Ann Arbor announced that they had—using pigs—found a way to remove all of the animal’s blood and replace it with cold saline solution, which induces rapid hypothermia and halts almost all cellular activity—essentially placing the pig into suspended animation.
Once again, our technology messed with our terminology. 'After we did those experiments,' Peter Rhee, one of the main researchers involved, recently told New Scientist, 'the definition of dead changed. Every day at work I declare people dead. They have no signs of life, no heartbeat, no brain activity. I sign a piece of paper knowing in my heart that they are not actually dead. I could, right then and there, suspend them. But I have to put them in a body bag. It’s frustrating to know there is a solution.'
And that solution is finally being tested out in humans. As of March 29, 2014, a team of surgeons trained in this saline-cooling procedure is on emergency call at the UPMC Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In this field trial of the technique, patients who arrive at the hospital after having suffered cardiac arrest after traumatic injury (i.e. gunshots) and do not respond to attempts to restart their heart will be cooled with saline  to about 10 degrees Celsius (50 Fahrenheit). Their cellular activity will stop. They will be 'clinically dead.' But—if doctors can repair the trauma in roughly two hours—they are still capable of being revived.
In itself, this is amazing. This is two hours of suspended animation—which  has been the stuff of sci-fi for almost a century. Today it’s scientific fact.
But where things get really interesting is what happens tomorrow. As the technology progresses, it is not too much of a stretch to say those two hours of suspended animation will give way to four hours and eight hours and sooner or later whole days and weeks and months—in other words, we’ll have mastered artificial hibernation.
And there are plenty of good reasons to master this technique, with deep space exploration being at the top of most people’s lists. But what happens, say, when a spaceship on its way to the planet formerly known as Pluto, complete with a crew in hibernation, gets dinged by an asteroid and knocked off course and is thus lost before they land and can be reanimated. The crew spends years and years and years in artificial hibernation. So are they alive or are they dead?
Put differently, if we know this crew can be later revived, but centuries might pass before we can actually catch the ship and revive the crew, is it ethical for us to shoot up a death ray laser beam from Earth to destroy ship and put the crew out of their suspended misery?
Since that 1768 Encyclopedia Britannica definition, the entry for death has been rewritten over 30 times. You would assume that today, in a society that can measure effects down to the quantum level, that death’s definition would be fixed. But with suspended animation suddenly heading into human trails, when it comes to defining death, we’re still nowhere close to a straight answer."

Source:
1. http://singularityhub.com/2014/05/27/suspended-animation-goes-primetime-say-goodbye-to-death-as-we-know-it/
2. http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenkotler/2014/05/21/suspended-animation-goes-primetime-say-goodbye-to-death-as-we-know-it/

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality..."


"Living longer with no pain?"

The schools where Apple, Google, and Facebook get their recruits

Analytics with Google


Not quite there yet, I guess...






"Creative Destruction of Medicine"

"20% Doctors Included"

http://www.khoslaventures.com/20-percent-doctor-included-speculations-and-musings-of-a-technology-optimist

Article by Vinod Khosla:

"Healthcare today is broken. It’s the result of approaching medicine according to practice and tradition, rather than real science primed by objective data, and unencumbered with the conflicts of interest that lead to suboptimal results. Doctors today are doing the best they can given the current system, but we should embrace the new opportunities ahead of us.
Technology will reinvent healthcare as we know it. It is inevitable that, in the future, the majority of physicians’ diagnostic, prescription and administrative work, which over time may approach 80-percent of total doctor time, will be replaced by smart hardware and software. Healthcare will become more scientific and more consistent, delivering better-quality care with inexpensive data-gathering techniques, continual monitoring, more rigorous science and more available and ubiquitous information leading to personalized patient insight. Many new findings will be outside the reach of most physicians because of the volume of data and the unique holistic insights that data will provide about a patient’s very complex condition. Hundreds of thousands or even millions of data points may go into diagnosing a condition and monitoring the progress of a therapy or prescription, well beyond the capability of any human to adequately consider.
This evolution from an entirely human-based healthcare system to an increasingly automated system will take time, and there are many ways in which it can happen. Today’s traditional approaches will get better as new approaches, and even new medicine, will be invented. The remaining 20-percent of physicians’ work will be AMPLIFIED, making them even more effective. Doctors will be able to operate at substantially improved levels of expertise in multiple domains, and they also will be able to handle many more patients. The primary care physician and maybe even the nurse practitioner may be able to operate at the level of six specialists handling six areas of care for one patient with multiple comorbidities in a more coordinated and comprehensive manner without inter-specialist conflicts. This transition will affect each group of actors in the current system differently. Some constituencies will be affected favorably in some dimensions and worse in others, but the net benefit will be substantially positive for society and individual patients but it is likely that a focus on science, data, and personalization will lead to plenty of unintended benefits that we cannot anticipate today. Nurses will be made much more capable by technology, often replacing the functions only doctors perform today. New medical insights, including ones we cannot yet envision, will be commonplace, and the practices we follow will be substantially better validated by more rigorous scientific methods.
My statements are not forecasts that the hospital burn unit or emergency department will run without any humans on staff. Though the early changes will appear underwhelming and clumsy, by 2025 they will seem obvious, inevitable and well beyond the changes we might envision today. Expect today’s expert doctors to think these changes are implausible when they are asked about this possibility, and expect the classic response of “human judgment will not be replaced by technology” from people who are not qualified to judge what software technology in 2030 might be capable of.  Of course, the possibility also exists that a much more cooperative system leveraging both humans and technological systems in their respective strengths may also evolve, as proposed in the book Race Against the Machine, but the core functions necessary for complex diagnoses will more than likely be driven by machine judgment instead of human judgment.
The transition will happen in fits and starts along different pathways with many course corrections, steps backward and mistakes as we figure out the best approach. Given the importance of having clarity on what I hypothesize as my forecasts, I want to be clear that they are only directional guesses rather than precise predictions. Further, though many different disciplines will contribute to the innovation in medicine like biological research or new device development, I am mostly concerned with the contributions of digital health technologies to medical innovation. This should not be underemphasized, as these contributions, though potentially the most significant, are also the most variable, and hardest to predict in direction, timelines and scope..."

"InformedDNA supports labs sharing patients' de-identified variant data in open-access databases"

"The March of Add-Appters"

http://blog.withings.com/2014/05/20/the-march-of-add-appters-2
http://blog.withings.com/2014/05/20/the-march-of-add-appters-2
LINKEDIN GROUP DIGITAL HEALTH

10 Programming Languages You Should Learn in 2014

Silicone (Condom) Valley: Is Big Data The Next STD?


http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/19/larry-pages-wish-to-make-all-health-data-public-has-big-benefits-and-big-risks/
Is "Big Data" the next STD?
"So let’s take myself as an example: There are only so many 5’4 31-year-old male Jews living in San Francisco’s Mission District working in the media. An amateur statistician could combine that data, scrape Twitter, and alert my friends to all my secret medical history in the time it’d take me to order a copy of 1984 on Amazon." (Source)

"A literal tree of knowledge, created by injecting apples with Wikipedia DNA"

http://www.psfk.com/2014/05/tree-of-knowledge-wikipedia-dna-strands.html#!O0nsV

Biopython Project

@Biopython

BGI: "The shape of the genome may be an even better predictor of cancer than gene expression"

One-size-fits-all medicine VS "genomic" precision medicine



A "Threat Net" of 200 hospitals with biosensors that can identify >1000 pathogens

Patients are dying because their physician don't get their lab results in time!

Regina Holliday's Keynote Speech - 2014 We Can Do Better

"Regina Holliday a patient advocate who advocates through her art. After spending 16 years working in retail management and six years teaching art, Regina began painting a series of murals depicting the need for clarity and transparency in medical records.

This advocacy mission was inspired by her husband's struggle to get appropriate care during eleven weeks of continuous hospitalization at five facilities. After his death, she began painting a large mural entitled "73 cents." This piece -- on display in Washington, DC -- and depicts the Holliday family's journey through the medical system and their desperate attempt to access his medical record. The painting became part of the national healthcare debate and was featured on BBC, CNN, CBS, AOL and the Voice of America. The Washington Post and many international newspapers reported on this painting during its completion in the fall of 2009."


http://youtu.be/BAcaeJq0K0I

Welcome to the digital era of biology and medicine!

Click on the pic to view it full size.
Courtesy of Portable Genomics, San Diego, CA, USA.

Portable Genomics "Billautshow" interview (French version): see video here.

EDUTech 2014 in Brisbane, Australia, June 3-4

@IMC_Learning
http://www.im-c.com/en

"Little privacy protection for personal health data culled from fitness-tracking apps"



What?!? Problem still not solved? All right, then, as a refresher, we need to see this awesome pres again (not easy to watch...)

 
AS A CONCLUSION: YES, We Can Do Better

http://youtu.be/BAcaeJq0K0I

"Wireless power transfer to deep-tissue microimplants"

"Google to NHS: modernise or vanish"

Eric Topol, MD, to young physicians: "Instead of an intelligence IQ, I ask what is your DQ---your digital quotient?"


http://www.temple.edu/medicine/tusm_grad_speech_topol.htm
"(...) You are graduating at an extraordinary time…a digital, computer, machine age that is providing exhilarating innovation….changes that most of us could not envision would happen this quickly…or ever. Oh, how I wish I could trade places with you! When I graduated medical school, the term digital referred to the rectal exam.

In the digital world, Google’s Driverless Cars have already travelled 700,000 miles without an accident. They can even now sense bicyclists and hand gestures better than humans. We’ve seen how quadriplegics can fully mind control their wheelchair or how a wounded soldier can move a prosthetic limb by thoughts.

For individuals who are blind, there are camera eye sensors that see things and transmit the information through a bone conduction earpiece. And there are smartphone-app connected hearing aids that provide better than normal human hearing. Your speech can not only be immediately translated but also made into your own voice speaking in a foreign language that you don’t know a single word!
 
These are all examples of artificial intelligence. More commonly you see this when you get recommendations from Amazon or Netflix. Or when you ask Siri to make your dinner reservation. When you get autofill on searches on Google and through apps like Google Now, one called SwiftKey reads your Twitter feeds and tells you to get flowers because your girlfriend is sad. Or the facial recognition programs like Facebook that automatically tags photos, and now in medicine unsupervised computer algorithms that can review images from a tumor to make the diagnosis and provide expected survival statistics.---better than pathologists. Computers can now read some types of facial expression, like pain, and identify an individual by facial recognition more accurately than people! Algorithms of pictures of a skin lesions have just been shown to be interpreted more accurately than by dermatologists.

The supercomputer IBM Watson can process 200 million pages of medical literature in 1 second. That’s pretty darn fast….even faster than some doctors think they can process information."

"A high school freshman’s software for studying cancer genes wins top Intel science fair prize"

http://medcitynews.com/2014/05/intel-science-fair-winners-machine-learning-software-studying-cancer-genes

The biggest communication problem is...

"The Building Blocks of Circuits, Now Ready to Wrap Around Your Internal Organs"

Are you prepared for your digital death?

"First Ever Opposite Lung, Living Donor Lung Transplant Takes Place Thanks to 3D Printing"

Modernizing Medicine With "Made with Watson" apps

"Modernizing Medicine  One in five Americans will develop skin cancer – a scary statistic that will impact a friend or a loved one in our lifetime. Today, One out of four dermatologists in the nation are using Modernizing Medicine’s Electronic Medical Assistant® (EMA™) iPad application to improve patient interaction and healthcare outcomes. The company is enhancing EMA by developing schEMA™, a powered by IBM Watson app designed to help doctors by answering medical questions at the point of care. Utilizing cognitive computing and natural language processing, schEMA comprehends published healthcare information, such as peer-reviewed medical journals, to enable physicians to ask questions about conditions, treatments and outcomes and get back answers in seconds. The goal is to strengthen physician’s recommendations and enable them to efficiently practice evidence-based medicine. The company also provides EMA for the specialties of ophthalmology, plastic surgery, orthopedics and otolaryngology and is expanding into gastroenterology, urology and rheumatology." (Source)