A Few Updates

December 12th, 2005 Chris Posted in Uncategorized |

• I’m currently back in St. Louis for the holidays. I’ll also be making a quick trip to Kirksville this Tuesday night and Wednesday. If you’ll be in either place at the same time as me and want to hang out, let me know.
• I just finished up my second research rotation in the Bioinformatics Research Laboratory. It’s kind of a subset of the Human Genome Sequencing Center at BCM. They’ve since expanded to sequencing everything they can get their hands on - other primates, agriculturally important species, bacterial genomes, etc. The really big question now is how to find the signal in all this noise. Remember the “chemical revolution” a few decades back? Well, the genomics revolution is looming, and that place is near ground zero.
• I also set up my next rotation last week, and I’m pretty excited about it. I’ll be working in a lab at Texas Children’s Hospital, doing genomic and proteomic analysis of pediatric cancer. Knowing that your PI is actually seeing patients who could reap benefits from the work you’re doing seems immensely gratifying to me. I also feel like it lends a certain sense of urgency to the work. The sooner we can make improvements, the better off these sick kids will be. (Urgency is also good, because I’d like to beat my program’s 5.5 year average. I’d be happy with 5 years, and estatic with 4.5)

  The goal of the lab isn’t to cure cancer right away but to better understand it, so that treatment can be more precise and customized for each patient and specific cancer type. The field’s still in its infancy, but you can be sure that genomic testing and customized treatment like this will be all over the place in 20 years. It’s exciting to be getting in on the ground floor.