The slides from my presentation at the President's Council of Science and Technology Advisors (PCAST) PCAST meeting last week are now up on the OSTP web site. I discussed the context for this presentation in an earlier post.
The meeting also included an interesting discussion on industrial technology transfer policies and the payback from federally sponsored research. Susan Butts from Dow Chemical presented one of the best summaries of the benefits of federally sponsored research that I have seen recently. I have taken the liberty of reproducing it here, but you can view her complete presentation for a broader context.
The PCAST personalized medicine subcommittee, chaired by Kathleen Behrens, hosted several speakers.Among the more interesting pieces of information (and there were many) was an analysis of the efficacy of chemotherapy for breast cancer based on genotype. These are sobering statistics indeed, and a powerful argument for personalized diagnostics and treatment based on genetic characteristics.
It really make me reflect again that so many things we call cancer, respiratory disease, heart disease or other things are in fact a hugely diverse set of genetic diseases. It also emphasizes the power of computing for good, as personalized medicine, whether for medical records management, genetic sequencing, diagnostics and imaging or biological processor modeling, depends critically on the power for computing and data analysis.
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