SEQUENCE EVERYTHING: How We Will Build The American Biobank With DIMMPS. Will It Be Funded By ARPA-H?
A Nobel Prize for a geneticist touches off our moment
Readers of this Substack will recall that I applauded the decision by President Biden to do a Health DARPA. That sort of far out thinking made me proud to become a supporter.
This is the Internet of our time. This is the railroad. This is the space race. This is electrification. This is the Tennessee Valley Authority. This is the intercontinental freeway system.
America, in other words, is ready for this time. Welcome to the Health Age.
We can contrast the Health Age from the Pharma Age by considering how consistent the Health Age is with both our commitment to public health and individual freedom.
There’s something un-American about one-size-fits-all approaches. And so it is with the mandatory vaccination.
Charles DeGaulle once asked how he could govern a country with 246 different types of cheese. (There are now 1200 types of cheese.) We might ask a similar question of America. A country where you can order more than 80,000 Starbucks drink combinations is not a country where you can force everyone to do anything. You might say that our diversity is our strength but equality means treating everyone with dignity—not the same.
So why did the government require all of us to take an experimental vaccine? While many people might suggest it’s the power of the Pharma lobby, I think it’s more likely that it’s sheer ignorance and fear about what COVID was and could do. The “zero COVID” proponents don’t want everyone to get genetically sequenced and to know their real risks of the disease or taking an experimental vaccine. They preferred the lockdown to human flourishing because it was supposedly the easy solution to a complicated problem. Thank God we’re done with that silliness.
And yet the vaccine does have real risks associated with it, especially for those young men of fighting age. Yes, myocarditis is a real threat.
The science is coming in and the results are disturbing, to put it mildly. Did we subject millions of fighting age men to something that could kill them?
The findings, published Monday in the American Heart Association journal Circulation, could partially answer why otherwise healthy young people sometimes develop a condition that can lead to heart failure and sudden cardiac death, researchers said.
In the rare instances when it happens, myocarditis "often affects young patients in the prime of life, and we've never understood why," said senior study author Dr. Sanjay Prasad, a professor of cardiomyopathy at the Imperial College London in the United Kingdom. He also is a consultant cardiologist at Royal Brompton Hospital in London.
The new, population-based study suggests that "it's not just random," he said. "For a subset of people, there's a gene that predisposes them to this, or makes them susceptible."
Never again. And soon it’ll never happen again.
Last week Illumina announced that it was offering $200 for a full genome test. Another group is offering for $100.
For what it’s worth I suspect in the next five years genomic sequencing will be free.
“It’ll be a commodity,” says a friend with twenty years in the field. He’s right.
DNA will be rendered into data and then they’ll be gobs and gobs of data. How we shall pay for all of this data storage, I haven’t a clue — I only have a trend line! — but I know that this is my life’s work. If you’re interested in joining, you know where to find me.
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On the geopolitical front Sweden joining NATO whilst Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo winning the Nobel Prize suggest that we’re in a kind of Swedish egalitarian moment. We trust the Swedes, don’t we? Don’t they help us build our furniture? Now they’ll help us build the future by examining the past.
The biographical elements of Pääbo’s story are the sort of thing you might expect from the pro-life community. Pääbo was born out of wedlock. (His mother was Estonian chemist Karin Pääbo whilst his father Sune Bergström was a fellow Nobelist.)
The New Yorker discussed Pääbo’s very Swedish origins in 2011.
For a time, she worked in the laboratory of a biochemist named Sune Bergström, who later won a Nobel Prize. Pääbo was the product of a lab affair between the two, and, although he knew who his father was, he wasn’t supposed to discuss it. Bergström had a wife and another son; Pääbo’s mother, meanwhile, never married. Every Saturday, Bergström would visit Pääbo and take him for a walk in the woods, or somewhere else where he didn’t think he’d be recognized.
“Officially, at home, he worked on Saturday,” Pääbo told me. “It was really crazy. His wife knew. But they never talked about it. She never tried to call him at work on Saturdays.” As a child, Pääbo wasn’t particularly bothered by the whole arrangement; later, he occasionally threatened to knock on Bergström’s door. “I would say, ‘You have to tell your son—your other son—because he will find out sometime,’” he recalled. Bergström would promise to do this, but never followed through. (As a result, Bergström’s other son did not learn that Pääbo existed until shortly before Bergström’s death, in 2004.)
Good on his mother — an Estonian refugee! — for choosing life. Good on the Swedish welfare state for making that possible. Love children deserve life, too — just as all children do. They’re God children. This is the sort of pro-life activism I can get behind. Your child could grow up to win the Nobel Prize!
That Pääbo won the Nobel Prize for what we might call the study of speciation is equally fascinating. “There were almost always other types of humans around,” Pääbo once said.
Pääbo’s notion that there many sorts of humans around is consistent with the global efforts to build a diverse — that is non-European and non-Chinese — genetics database. We will go forward with the stewardship understanding of genetics.
I saw this future coming when I cofounded Traitwell and when I invested in a number of genetics start-ups — all of which have been successful.
At Traitwell we are working to build the world’s largest biobank.
While consumer genomics is impressive it’s a little too Chinese, Chisraeli or Israeli for the moment. Consumer genomics has too often been something left to other nations. Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, and Chinese-backed Sequoia are all investors in consumer genetics. This should give us pause. Clearly there’s something these men understood about genetics’ propensity for power.
To be sure those countries have their place in the discussion but Americans should work with our allied countries in Australia and the United Kingdom to build a truly impressive biobank. Of course we can’t do that without government and I suspect, without AUKUS.
The focus should be on the Deceased, Infants, Migrants, Military, Prisoners, and Students, or DIMMPS. These are all groups for whom decisions are made in consultation with others and so especial care must be made. They are therefore ideal groups for Traitwell to help sequence.
My intuition is that these groups — the DIMMPS — will be conquered one by one. Together they could make the beginnings of a giant American biobank — a sort of genomic search engine. Illumina will struggle with building this search engine for the same reason that Microsoft struggled with building a competitor to Google. Hardware companies build lousy software. Add to that the anti-trust issues and you have a real problem for Illumina. Axios notes that “there's a new competition for faster, cheaper DNA sequencing.”
I envision a world where researchers of all types upload their polygenic score analysis to a centralized database and where the public at large can query their own DNA against the latest research for free.
Are we really going to argue that $200 (and falling) per person is too much?
For roughly the price of what we’ve spent in Ukraine — $64 billion — we could full sequence all 320 million Americans. For what we’re going to spend to rebuild Florida we could sequence all of AUKUS and then some.
Deceased
The average funeral is somewhere around $10,000. It would be well worth it for the government to charge a $200-$300 funeral surcharge to pay for sequencing or for funeral homes to offer it to the families in the pre-needs category.
Grandma may have been felled by cancer but if you get sequenced, you can prevent cancer by catching it earlier. Eventually family tree information will be key for families to see when they go to the doctors. Why else does the doctor ask for “family history”?
Knowing who is related to whom is also super important for allocating who is owed what from the inheritance.
Infants
What mother isn’t going to want to sequence her child and tag it onto the price of birth?
Ella Ceron of Bloomberg:
A new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that the average cost of childbirth in the US is $18,865 under large insurance plans. Though most of that is often picked up by insurance, out-of-pocket payments clock in at an average of $2,854.
Military
It costs between $55,000 to $74,000 to send a recruit through training, depending on if they attend one-station unit training or a combination of basic combat training and advanced individual training. It may well be the case that we want a smaller military than one we currently have but however large a military we have, we certainly want a healthy one.
Two hundred bucks to get endless amounts of data about soldiers? It’s a steal. Oh and did I mention that other countries are already doing this? Better get to it then!
Migrants
“Know your migrant” is a key part of resettling them. My grandfather — who ran the largest Vietnamese resettlement program — knew this.
Migration will continue to be a major problem for the world. We’ve already seen that war criminals were settled in the U.S. We need to know who the migrants are and from whence they come and what traits they have.
Prisoners
There are a lot of innocent people in jail and there are a lot of people who deserve prison. Matt Yglesias notes a study showing how adding DNA into a databases reduces crime.
A couple of years ago, Anne Sofie Tegner Anker, Jennifer Doleac, and Rasmus Landersø published a really interesting paper about the impact of a law passed in Denmark that allowed Danish police to add anyone charged with a felony to a DNA database, increasing the share of arrestees added from roughly 4 percent to about 40 percent.
So what was the impact? The authors “find that DNA registration reduces recidivism within the following year by up to 42%.”
I was somewhat surprised that Yglesias didn’t mention Othram or Clearview. We really can live in a world where there’s no crime. It’s weird that Republicans don’t see this yet (or worse don’t want to do it). I’ve tried! I’ve tried! But some GOPers just love criming.
So I’m donating to Democrats. I recently maxed out to Karen Bass who is running for mayor of L.A. I suspect if she used technology she wouldn’t have to deal with a lot of the corruption tomfoolery of the LAPD.
I agree with Yglesias about collecting people’s DNA to reduce crime but if we’re going to collect their DNA why not also tell them things about themselves? Like, I don’t know, why they might be criming? I know, I know we aren’t supposed to talk about how behavior, personality, and intelligence are all highly heritable — and yes, that does include criminal behavior.
Of course each of us is a prisoner to some sort of affliction. And knowing is half the battle. OK, I stole that from G.I. Joe.
But we might become a more empathetic society if we become a more genetic one.
Students
Being able to process students’ DNA will be an essential part of education in the future, without respect to what school the child attends. If you think about it, do we even really need to go to school? No! What we need is education. Education comes from the Latin verb educare, related to educere ‘lead out.’ We need to lead the children out of the failed policies of the past. (That doesn’t mean we fail to educate them. I oppose the Reganista defunding of education programs at the state universities.)
Genetics can help students understand what the kids might be best at — and what to avoid. It could also help our children find the best path to being what they want to be. Sure beats the guidance counselor. Can you believe he told me to join the intelligence community and not to be a blogger or businessman? For shame!
"the science is coming in"?
the science has been there for at least a year, AHA just now having permission to divulge their findings is not science coming in. it is a propaganda regime (not the biden administration, but his handler's) that has finally decided it cannot keep hiding the sun with a thumb.