A longer explanation of what Venter is up to

New Venter Center Will Likely Be a Boon for Overall Genome Sequencing [GenomeWeb]

His facility is still along way from doing a person's genome for a couple of thousand bucks but having it is good becaue it will fill a need. Government funding of sequencing is falling, now that the goal of the Human Genome project has been met (or almost so). We still need something to push new technologies.   11:46:32 PM    

• Using technology to take information and create knowledge. In my view, the combination of a weblogger and a news aggregator is a killer ap when it comes to information dispersal and knowledge creation. I wrote a whitepaper on some of my ideas a year ago that got little traction at Immunex (I'll try and post an edited version soon). For example, in biotech, almost all companies have access to the same information. How do you create a competitive edge? By creating knowledge and being able to reach major decisions quicker than anyone else. During the 16 years I was at Immunex, it went from about 100 employees to almost 3000. In my opinion it was not because we were smarter than anyone else. Even huge slow moving dinosaurs have smart people. It was because we could move from the lab bench to a preclinical decision extremely rapidly. And we made good decisions based on a firm knowledge of what was going on. (We were lucky but luck favors the prepared mind.) This became more difficult to achieve as we got larger but I believe that technology can lower the friction and increase information dispersal. This would allow effective knowledge to be created, leading to good decisions, in groups of people that are significantly larger than 50-100 people (there is a reason that a group of 62-190 soldiers is called a company). Just as organisms developed a circulation system to allow themselves to become larger, connectivity and information dispersal using technology will permit adaptive networks of collaborative individuals to become a much larger community than could exist in industrial age companies
• Writing and talking. Everyone really responds to my abilities to discuss almost any topic. I used to worry that this would make me boring but I have found as I have gotten older that this is not the case. Because I usually can discuss topics that are of interest to the people I am with, while a bore only talks about things that they find interesting. This makes me a very good connector and dispersor (is that a word?) of knowledge. Working on the My View column while at Immunex rekindled my desire to write. It also brought more positive feedback than anything else I have done. I really got a good feeling for how unique this ability is. I feel I need to pursue this, since science in general, and biotechnology in particular, need effective speakers. There are some very good scientific journalists but few journalists understand in detail the needs, desires and perspectives of a scientist.

12:31:40 PM