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Podcast: Hidden Forces
Episode:

Genetics, Genomics, and Big Data in Medicine | A Conversation with Eric Schadt
Category: Business
Duration: 01:03:57
Publish Date: 2017-07-10 00:00:00
Description:

In Episode 15 of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas speaks with Dr. Eric Schadt. Eric Schadt is founding director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology and Chair of the Department of Genetics and Genomics Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. During the course of his 20-year career, Dr. Eric Schadt has built genetics and systems biology groups at Merck. He built the computational biology group at Rosetta. He has served as co-founder of Sage Bionetworks and as Chief Science Officer of Pacific Biosciences. He now serves as the founder and CEO of Sema4. He has published more than 300 peer-reviewed papers in leading scientific journals, and he has contributed to a number of discoveries relating to the genetic basis of common human diseases such as diabetes, obesity and Alzheimer’s.

In this episode, we explore the information technology of biology: DNA. In other words, we explore the world of genomics. This is where big data looms large. We begin by mapping the territory of the human genome and exploring the pathways of disease. We look to understand the ways in which complex genetic combinations express themselves as phenotypes such as height, bone structure, intelligence, and personality. How are these traits coded for? What are the instructions our body uses to repair a damaged cell? What blueprint does it consult before trying to grow new arteries? How does it know to regulate our appetite or when start us down the path of puberty? What happens when these instructions are damaged? How can the smallest difference in the order of life’s code make all the difference for our success, our happiness, and even our survival?

50 years have passed, between the discovery of the double-helix and the mapping of the first human genome. What progress have we made in the 15 years since? How has our ability to sequence new genomes created a paradigm shift in medicine? What is the role of big data and artificial intelligence in finding the correlations needed in order to treat malignancies and prevent diseases? What is the promise of genomics? What are the perils of big data in medicine? And what stands in the way of us and this incredible future of human genetics?

Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas

Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou

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