Spread-em Up - Google plans to search through your Genes...

Business 2.0 just exclaimed "The Google Boys are teaming up with Craig Venter (of human genome mapping fame) to use Google's vast computing power to help unlock some of the myseries of biology, and maybe one day help you search through your genes."     

Reasons for this venture?

"Genetic information is going to be the leading edge of information that is going to change the world. Working with Google, we are trying to generate a gene catalogue to characterize all the genes on the planet and understand their evolutionary development. Geneticists have wanted to do this for generations." "Over time", Venter said, "Google will build up a genetic database, analyze it, and find meaningful correlations for individuals and populations. . . . Google's data-mining techniques appear well-suited to the formidable challenges posed by analyzing the genetic sequence.  "

As a Marketing-Dude - lets ask the question we are trained to ask - So what does it mean for the customer?

Venter has an answer for that too - "People will be able to log on to a Google site using search capacities and have the ability to understand things about themselves as they change in real time," "What does it mean to have this variation in genes? What else is known? And instead of having a few elitist scientists doing this and dictating to the world what it means, with Google it would be creating several million scientists.

"Google has empowered individuals to do searches and get information and have things in seconds at their fingertips," he went on. "Where is that more important than understanding our own biology and its connection to disease and behavior? With Google, you will be able to get an understanding of your own genes. Google has the capacity to do all of this, and it is one of the discussions I have had with Larry and Sergey."

What is super interesting was that when I met Peter Neupert, the Microsoft Corp VP (and incharge of Health Strategy here at Microsoft) at the networking session organized by Shannon Huffman (Tuck'03) - the discussion was largely about biotech and about power to the consumers on data. The question he kept asking was - but do the customers care if they are healthy? The same qn can be asked here. Sounds interesting either way.

[Img Originally uploaded by lizmuzik]