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Could an effort to gather genetic data from its population of one billion people help India take the lead in advanced healthcare?
India is the land of inventors and industry, spices and spirituality - and 1.3 billion human genomes. But although the subcontinent contributes around 20% of the world's population, the DNA sequences of its people make up around 0.2% of global genetic databases.
In a similar vein, 81% of the world's genomic information has been collected from people with European ancestry. Still, this is an improvement from a staggering 96% back in 2009.
At the same time, there's a growing interest in developing new, more effective therapies tailored to an individual's genetic makeup - an idea known as precision or personalised medicine.
Missing out on mapping worldwide genetic diversity is a big mistake, according to Sumit Jamuar, chief executive of Global Gene Corp.
It's a company aiming to democratise healthcare by capturing anonymised genetic data from populations around the world and share it with the global community of academic and pharmaceutical industry researchers. It will start by focusing on populations in South Asia.
Khan Noonien Singh's name was scrupulously scrubbed from the proposal.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 24 2017, @05:14AM (10 children)
How can a government spend resources on genomic research when most of the people think toilets and potable water are advanced technology?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 24 2017, @05:18AM (4 children)
Coding first, toilets second. The coding is more needful.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 24 2017, @05:56AM (3 children)
You mean copy/pasting code from curryoverflow surely?
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday June 24 2017, @06:25AM (2 children)
Aha, it's the curry in the source that makes it all glitch and work on rare occasions ;-)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Saturday June 24 2017, @02:34PM (1 child)
Well, functional programming advocated would probably insist that it's thew lack of curry that causes problems. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday June 25 2017, @02:28AM
No curry, just Haskell. That makes code taste bad and computer not wanting it ;)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by nishi.b on Saturday June 24 2017, @09:36AM (1 child)
Because they may be thinking long-term as well as short term ? It's not like no part of India has toilets or water, and no one is doing anything about it.
And why the focus on India ? It's not like the US is tackling problems like poverty and health for its poorer population instead of using billions to create military planes and bombs...
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 24 2017, @02:43PM
... especially compared to the poor of India.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Saturday June 24 2017, @09:43AM (2 children)
How can the U.S. launch space missions when people are dying from heroin overdoses?
How can anybody do X when Bad Thing Y is happening?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 24 2017, @03:04PM
Why should I be forced to pay for space missions when I'd rather fund drug-recovery programs? Government is wasting my resources.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 24 2017, @11:18PM
Space missions ultimately contribute to the continued survival of the human race in case a global killer tier disaster strikes. I'm with you about the general sentiment, but a special exception can be given to space-tier stuff.