Some of the technologies and methods researchers say will allow humans to live far beyond today’s life expectancies might seem a bit sci-fi, but last week’s CED Life Science Conference presentation by a California scientist behind national headline-grabbing Human Longevity Inc. considers the equally radical inventions of the last 150 years.
1881 marked the discovery of germ theory, which led to the vaccines, antiseptics and antibiotics, which combined have helped to double life expectancy.
The pace of innovation has only accelerated in recent years. Human Longevity Inc. co-founder Craig Venter sequenced the first human genome over nine months in 2000, and at a price tag of $100 million. Today’s machines sequence a genome in a fraction of the time and for as little as $1,300. What will provide even more insight into the genome and ways to predict, prevent and treat disease within it is the advancement of computers to learn typical genomes based on origin and ethnicity and measure ours against them.
Human Longevity will lead those efforts, says Brad Perkins, chief medical officer of the controversial but influential San Diego-based company. A year since it was announced publicly by the genetics genius Venter and his co-founder and X-Prize creator Peter Diamandis, Human Longevity has developed the world’s largest genome sequencing center with 35,000 entire genomes sequenced last year and 100,000 planned for 2015, in partnership with organizations like Genentech.
To learn more about Human Longevity, how it became the fastest assembler of the human genome in history, and its future plans to transform the way disease and illness are identified and treated, watch Perkins’s talk from last week’s CED Life Science Conference in Raleigh:
