2010 Speakers

Personal Genome Pioneers

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  Misha Angrist is Assistant Professor of the Practice in the Duke University Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy. His book, Here is a Human Being: At the Dawn of Personal Genomics, will be published by HarperCollins this fall. He is PGP#4.

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  George Church is Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School, Director of the Center for Computational Genetics. He is the founder of the Personal Genome Project (PGP), Chairman of PersonalGenomes.org, and PGP#1.

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  Esther Dyson is chairman of EDventure Holdings and sits on the board of 23andMe and of PersonalGenomes.org, among many other things. She is a believer in user-generated health as the best way to reduce the costs of health care, and is looking for investments in that new market. She is also PGP#3. (Photo credit: Tom Gruber)

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  Jay T. Flatley is the President and Cheif Executive Officer of Illumina. Previously he was president and CEO of Molecular Dyanmics, later acquired by Amersham Pharmacia Biotech and now a part of GE Healthcare.

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  Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is producer of the PBS series Faces of America.

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  Rosalynn Gill is the Vice President, Scientific Affairs of Ipsogen Inc. Previously she was the Chief Science Officer and co-founder of Sciona. She is PGP#9.

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  Seong-Jin Kim is director of the Lee Gilya Cancer and Diabetes Institute, Gachon University of Medicine and Science, South Korea.

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  Greg Lucier serves as chairman and chief executive officer of Life Technologies, a global biotechnology company based in Carlsbad, California. Under Mr. Lucier's leadership, the company has grown from $700 million in revenues when he took the helm in 2003 to $3.3 billion in sales today. The company has expanded to serve clients in more than 100 countries around the globe and employs more than 9,000 people. Prior to joining Life Technologies, Mr. Lucier served in a variety of executive leadership roles with General Electric Corporation, and was voted a corporate officer by that company's board of directors in 1999. Mr. Lucier also serves as the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Sanford-Burnham Institute for Medical Research, as a Director for BIO, the world's largest biotechnology industry organization, and he is a member of the board of directors for Carefusion Corporation, a New York Stock Exchange listed healthcare company.

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  James Lupski is the Cullen Endowed Chair in Molecular Genetics and Professor, Department of Molecular and Human Genetics, Baylor College of Medicine. He is an expert on Charcot-Marie-Tooth neuropathy.

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  Stephen Quake is a Professor of Bioengineering and Co-Chair, Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University. He is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and founder of Helicos. (Photo credit: George Nikitin/AP, ©HHMI)

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  James Watson was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1962 for the discovery of the structure of DNA. He helped establish the Human Genome Project and was the director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He is also the author of the bestselling book The Double Helix.

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  John, Judy, Anne & Paul West are the first family of four to have their genomes sequenced while in good health, specifically to look for medical issues before symptoms appear (Illumina Personal Genome Service, 2009). Mr. West is currently CEO of Novocell, Inc, a stem cell engineering company focused on diabetes. He was previously CEO of the DNA sequencing company Solexa and first worked on DNA sequencing automation in 1982. Anne West is a junior at the Harker High School in Saratoga, CA. She will speak on the family’s experience with personal genome sequencing.

Moderators

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  Robert Krulwich covers science for National Public Radio and is Co-host of NPR's "Radiolab." His specialty is explaining complex subjects—science, technology, economics – in a style that is clear, compelling and entertaining. For several decades he was a correspondent at ABC and CBS News plus he hosted PBS’ Frontline, Nova Science Now and a BBC cultural show, "The Edge." TV Guide called him "the most inventive network reporter in television." He has explored the structure of DNA with a banana, created his own Italian Opera "Ratto Interesso" to explain how the Federal Reserve regulates interest rates, he pioneered the use of new animation on ABC's Nightline, World News, and on NPR's Internet site to explore cellular biology and subprime lending.

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  Carl Zimmer has been called "as fine a science essayist as we have" by the New York Times Book Review. In his books, essays, articles, and blog posts, Zimmer reports from the frontiers of biology, where scientists are expanding our understanding of life. He is a frequent guest on radio programs, such as "Fresh Air" and "This American Life." Zimmer is a lecturer at Yale University, where he teaches writing about science and the environment. He is also the first Visiting Scholar at the Science, Health, and Environment Reporting Program at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He is, to his knowledge, the only writer after which a species of tapeworm has been named.

Speakers for the Prototypes of the Future

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  Dr. Radoje (Rade) Drmanac, chief scientific officer and co-founder of Complete Genomics since 2006, is one of the leading research scientists and inventors in the field of DNA sequencing-by-hybridization (SBH) and genomic microarrays. In 1994, he co-founded Hyseq (later Nuvelo) where, as chief scientific officer, he led the effort to discover and patent thousands of genes which formed the basis of Nuvelo’s drug development pipeline. Prior to Hyseq, Rade was a group leader at Argonne National Labs from 1991 to 1994 as part of the Department of Energy’s Human Genome Project. He completed his postdoctoral studies in 1990 in Hans Lehrach’s group at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London. He earned his Ph.D. in molecular biology for the conception and pioneering development of SBH technology from Belgrade University, where he also received B.S. and M.S. degrees in molecular biology.

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  Juan Enriquez is an experienced business leader, author, and academic who is recognized as a leading authority on the economic and political impacts of life sciences. He is a Managing Director in Excel Venture Management, a venture capital firm that invests in life science companies. He was the founding director of Harvard Business School’s Life Sciences Project. He then founded Biotechonomy LLC, a life sciences research and investment firm. In 2005, he co-founded Synthetic Genomics, Inc., a synthetic biology company. He is the author of the best-selling As the Future Catches You, an analysis of the impact of genomics on business and society. His latest book Untied States explores why, as technology advances, some countries are successful while others disappear. Mr. Enriquez serves on a number of boards including Cabot Corp., The Chairman’s International Council of the America’s Society, and the Visiting Committee of Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center. He earned a BA and MBA from Harvard, with Honors.

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  Rob Knight is an Assistant Professor in the Chemistry & Biochemistry Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His research includes studies of the relationships among RNA sequence, structure and function, and studies of microbial communities in different habitats, including the human microbiome. His lab is part of the Human Microbiome Project Data Analysis and Coordination Center, and he was recently selected for an HHMI Early Career Scientist Award. He received his Ph.D. in 2001 working with Laura Landweber at Princeton University, did postdoctoral work with Mike Yarus at the University of Colorado, and joined the Chemistry & Biochemistry Department in 2004 as the first hire made by the Colorado Initiative in Molecular Biotechnology.

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  W. Ian Lipkin, M.D. is the Director of the Center for Infection and Immunity, and Professor of Epidemiology, Neurology and Pathology in the Mailman School of Public Health and College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University. A physician-scientist, Lipkin is internationally recognized for his work with West Nile virus and SARS, as well as advancing pathogen discovery techniques by developing a staged strategy using techniques pioneered in his lab. These molecular biological methods, including MassTag-PCR, the GreeneChip diagnostic, and High Throughput Sequencing, are a major step towards identifying and studying new viral pathogens that emerge locally throughout the globe. A major node in a global network of investigators working to address the challenges of pathogen surveillance and discovery, Dr. Lipkin has trained over 30 internationally based scientists in these state-of-the art diagnostic techniques.

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  John, Judy, Anne & Paul West are the first family of four to have their genomes sequenced while in good health, specifically to look for medical issues before symptoms appear (Illumina Personal Genome Service, 2009). Mr. West is currently CEO of Novocell, Inc, a stem cell engineering company focused on diabetes. He was previously CEO of the DNA sequencing company Solexa and first worked on DNA sequencing automation in 1982. Anne West is a junior at the Harker High School in Saratoga, CA. She will speak on the family’s experience with personal genome sequencing.

Breakout Session Leaders

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  Jason Bobe serves as the Director of Community for the Personal Genome Project based at Harvard Medical School and is on the board of PersonalGenomes.org. He is also co-founder of DIYbio.org, an organization that aims to help make biology a worthwhile pursuit for citizen scientists and amateur biologists. He is interested in how emerging biotechnologies and the web are redefining the relationships between scientific research and medical communities, communities from the general public, and the network of actors in-between.

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  John Conley specializes in biotechnology and intellectual property law and is of counsel to Robinson, Bradshaw, Hinson and William Rand Kenan, Jr. Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina. He has practiced and published widely in the area of intellectual property law, and has advised companies and investors, as well as authored numerous publications, about the relationship between biotechnology and patent law and policy. He also regularly teaches civil procedure, intellectual property, biotechnology, and scientific evidence, as well as several interdisciplinary law and social science courses and seminars.

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  Richard C. Delerins, Ph.D. is a Faculty Fellow and a Research Scholar at UCLA and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris. As an academic, his work focuses on Cuisine, Nutrition and Health. His research deals with the concept of "nutritive strategies": how diets and cuisines are connected to the function of the body, including longevity, aging, strength, intellectual capacities and prevention of pathologies (obesity, type 2 diabetes). As a Chef, he explores the challenges of 21st century cuisines, preserving the environment and culinary traditions that relate to both identity and migratory patterns and the simultaneously nutrigenomic challenge of feeding our taste buds in consonance with our genes. Currently Richard C. Delerins is pioneering (as Principal Investigator) a project on "21st century Cuisine, Nutrition and Genetics in France and the United States." It involves geneticists, biostatisticians, nutritionists, public health scientists, anthropologists, historians of food, and chefs working at different scales of biology and culture, to nurture new methods and new pedagogies at the intersection of genetics, nutrition and cuisine.

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  David Dobbs writes on science, nature, and culture for publications such as the Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times science section, Wired, and Scientific American Mind, as well as his blog, Neuron Culture. His articles have been featured in two editions of the Best of Science Writing. He is also the author of three books, including Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral (Pantheon, 2005), and is working on his fourth, The Orchid and the Dandelion (Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt, in progress), which will further examine the sensitivity hypothesis he wrote about in "Orchid Children," his article in the December 2010 Atlantic.

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  Thomas Goetz is the executive editor of Wired Magazine, and author of the new book, The Decision Tree: Taking Control of Your Health in the New Era of Personalized Medicine. He holds an MPH from University of California, Berkeley.

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  Ryan Phelan is a board member of PersonalGenomes.org and the founder and president of DNA Direct, a company that provides guidance and decision support for genomic medicine to patients, providers and payors. DNA Direct was acquired by Medco in 2010. Phelan has been a strong consumer health advocate for the past 25 years, having started the first medical library for consumers in 1978. As Founding Director of Planetree, she helped create a national model for humanizing hospitals and a national model for providing health information to the public. In 1995 she founded Direct Medical Knowledge, an extensive consumer health web site highly regarded for its unique content depth and innovative search interface. In 1999 Direct Medical Knowledge was acquired by WebMD. Phelan is a co-founder of the ALL Species Foundation, a global science initiative to discover all life on Earth in the next 25 years.

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  Phil Reilly joined Third Rock Ventures in 2009, and supports the firm’s founding and advancement of new ventures, with a particular focus on seeking to nurture and grow transformational companies dedicated to breakthrough treatments for genetic disorders. Phil is an accomplished entrepreneur, and has a long standing interest in genetic testing and in developing new therapies for genetic diseases. Phil holds an MD from Yale University, a JD from Columbia University and is a member of the Massachusetts Bar and board certified in internal medicine and clinical genetics. He is currently a trustee of Cornell University. Phil has also served twice (2000 & 2003) as President of the American Society of Law, Medicine, and Ethics. He also served on the Board of Directors of the American Society for Human Genetics. Phil has also held numerous teaching positions at Tufts University School of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Cornell University and adjunct professor of both legal studies and biology at Brandeis University.

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  Dr. Jay Tiesman is a Principal Scientist and Genomics Group Leader in the Global Biotechnology Division of The Procter & Gamble Company in Cincinnati, Ohio. Since joining P&G in 1993, he has been actively involved in developing genomics capabilities within the Company. He has been particularly focused on the application of genomics technologies to consumer products. He is an acknowledged expert in microarray technologies and has published over 35 articles, two of which have earned “Publication of the Year” honors.

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  Dana Waring is a co-founder of the Personal Genetics Education Project (pgEd.org). Based in the Wu laboratory at Harvard Medical School, pgEd promotes dialogues on the ethical, legal and social issues in personal genetics through workshops for the general public, conference presentations, and educational events at the high school, undergraduate, and graduate levels. It is also working with MIT Press to produce a handbook for healthcare workers and their clients. Dana's role in pgEd includes developing curricula, conducting classes, research on the use and impact of personal genetics throughout the world, and fund-raising. She is also working to launch state-wide initiatives in Maine and Massachusetts, with an eye toward expanding this effort to the national level.

Awards Presenters

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  Jorge Conde is the co-founder and CEO of Knome. He has spent his entire professional career in the biotechnology industry, working in finance, business development, marketing and operations. Prior to Knome, Mr. Conde worked in strategic marketing and operations at MedImmune. He has also worked in business development at Helicos Biosciences, a DNA sequencing company, and in the life sciences group at Flagship Ventures, a venture capital firm. Previously, Mr. Conde was an investment banker at Morgan Stanley & Co., specializing in the biotechnology and genomics industries. Mr. Conde has been named one of the top 35 innovators under 35 by MIT Technology Review. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, an MS from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) and a Bachelor's degree in Biology from The Johns Hopkins University.

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  Jonathan Rothberg is the founder, CEO and Chairman of Ion Torrent. He is best known for pioneering high-speed, massively parallel DNA sequencing. The idea for massively parallel DNA sequencing/next gen sequencing came to him after his infant son was rushed to intensive care and he realized how critical individual genome sequencing was to human health. He subsequently founded 454 Life Sciences, bringing to market the first new method for sequencing genomes since Sanger and Gilbert won the Nobel prize in 1980. Jonathan's invention introduced the era of personal genomes and is now in use at major pharmaceutical companies, universities, genome centers, and medical centers around the world.

GET Conference 2010 Steering Committee

• Jason Bobe, PersonalGenomes.org
• Caryn Saitz, Creative Strategic Solutions
• Mikhail Shapiro, Third Rock Ventures
• Daniel Vorhaus, Robinson, Bradshaw, Hinson