Barcoding Life

[David Farber <dfarber () cs cmu edu>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: <Jim () Benetech org>
Date: December 31, 2007 1:07:21 PM EST
To: "Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>
Subject: Barcoding Life

Dave, I thought this recent blog post of mine would interest IP  
readers, from a long-time IP reader/lurker (me).

Jim Fruchterman, CEO, Benetech

Barcoding Life

Interspersed with all of my day job work (spending half my time on  
Bookshare.org for Education right now), I get to have exciting  
meetings with social entrepreneurs with incredible ideas. Last week, I  
had three of those meetings! Here's the first one:

My very first ever angel investor, Sheldon Breiner, contacted me on  
short notice to ask if I wanted to have dinner and a brainstorm with  
Winnie Hallwachs and Dan Janzen, a pair of U Penn professors with a  
dream: a handheld barcode reader for life. The concept is that Joe  
Average can walk into his backyard (or his field), and find out what  
species there are there. What's that ant? What bird left a feather in  
our garden? What's this plant doing here?

The concept of DNA barcoding is deceptively simple: you choose a  
particular section of genetic material shared by all animals, but  
where a 600 or 700 base sequence is pretty much unique to each  
species. That means you can collect a whole bunch of data from  
specimens and have a database that links that segment of DNA to a  
unique or nearly unique species. It also means you can build a very  
cheap device to gather this data: Dan and Winnie were talking about  
something well under $100.

We spent the meeting discussing ways of getting the project funded as  
well as how to build the device, with Sheldon as well as Brad Zlotnick  
and Jim Larrick, two outstanding physician-scientists (I'm simplifying  
a lot here). The Canadian government has apparently committed $50  
million to this $150 million project (the idea of DNA barcoding being  
an extremely clever, and Canadian, invention).

I'm not an expert in biotech by any stretch, but the implications of  
such a device are mindblowing. Imagine the impact on farming if you  
can accurately determine your pests instead of blasting your crops  
with broad-spectrum 'cides. The impact on medicine to cheaply identify  
the presence of pathogens in samples. And, finally, Dan's and Winnie's  
dream of a human society much more in tune with the life around them.

More information at the Consortium for the Barcode of Life.



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