Cloud computing, technology delivered over the Internet, has become a hot area in the last few years. The technology marketplace moves at breakneck speeds, but it is still shocking when innovation almost completely wipes out squabbles like those over open source (OS) vs. proprietary software.

“In a cloud world, source code is almost irrelevant,” Matt Asay recently wrote at GigaOm.
Tim O’Reilly was among the first to point this out in 2008, when he said that “Architecture trumps licensing any time.”

This statement rings true to most experts following this space, but for those who remember the heated battles between proprietary software providers and the open source community, the new environment seems almost surreal.

There was a time, for example, when Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer called Linux a “cancer.” Now the company is actively engaging the open source community in various ways, such as offering OS applications on its cloud, the Windows Azure platform, and publicizing that 350,000 OS applications run on Windows.

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In a study being published Friday in the journal Cell Stem Cell, scientists at Stanford University describe how they got muscle tissue in mice to regenerate, essentially re-awakening an ability that had been thought lost over evolutionary time. Such mature tissues normally don’t divide and proliferate.

The genomics industry, which provides reports about disease risk, ancestry, and drug reactions based on one’s DNA, came under fire last week as a Congressional Committee held hearings and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released an unscientific “study” of the sector.

According to undercover discussions with genomics firms, the GAO reports that “fictitious consumers received test results that are misleading and of little or no practical use.” The agency admits, however, that it “did not conduct a scientific study but instead documented observations that could be made by any consumer.”

The GAO’s “sting” operation on this nascent field looks more like a witch hunt, given that it lumped in legitimate testing companies with others that are not.

In one instance, a company representative said that it would be OK to send in someone else’s saliva to be tested. As the GAO points out, that practice is already restricted in 33 states, so this seems more like a matter of enforcement.

The GAO’s report is a tricky way of attempting to perturb the public about genetic testing, but it also raises a key question: Why haven’t government regulators disciplined the companies that are clearly breaking the already-established rules?

The GAO also blasts the genomics industry for providing different results for the same DNA, but when dealing with something as complicated as the human body, there often are valid scientific reasons for variation. As 23andMe points out on its blog, testing is not yet standardized, and some companies “employ different statistical models for making risk estimates; they establish different criteria for the inclusion of associations in their reports; and new associations are being discovered at a faster rate than companies’ development cycles.”

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Read more here: http://www.technewsworld.com/story/70499.html

My view of the health care worker of the future is not a doctor, but an 18-year-old, otherwise unemployed, who has two things. He has a backpack full of these tests, and a lancet to occasionally take a blood sample, and an AK-47. And these are the things that get him through his day.

Wow. (HT to Bryan for re-posting this article to the DIY Bio list).

The momentum seems to be well and truly in favour of the bureaucrats now. The prospect of increased regulation (specifically from the FDA) seemed to be enthusiastically received by the Committee today; there was explicit mention of increased money for the FDA to support such a move. The shape of this regulation is as yet unclear, but I’m now extremely pessimistic about the industry’s prospects of escaping excessive, innovation-crushing regulation in the US.

This is very bad news for those of us who wish to see personal medicine flourish.

“Researchers at UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center created a large, well armed battalion of tumor-seeking immune system cells and watched, in real time using Positron Emission Tomography (PET), as the special forces traveled throughout the body to locate and attack dangerous melanomas.”