A subtext of BIOSILICO was the business conditions of Big Pharma, the giant corporations that produce the , Zocors, Celebrexs, and Gleevecs of the health system. The pharmaceutical companies are the direct customers for many of the tools and research approaches of bioinformatics and in silico biology. Many speakers represented companies that are producing hardware and/or software for which the ...

Here’s a commentary by Gregory Stock, a UCLA geneticist who insists that our medical future includes not just fixing sick people but enhancing well people too. His comment is about the approval by the FDA of using growth hormone to increase the growth of children whose bodies already produce normal growth hormone. Initially the hormone was approved only for kids ...

We seem to be heading for vocabulary exhaustion. In a time when “extreme” is a common marketing adjective we’re running out of superlatives. So the term “tsunami”—the biggest of all waves—was used at BIOSILICO to describe the rate of data generation in life science. And just as a tsunami slamming the coastline is a big problem, the wealth of data ...

UCLA study examines health of California seniors “Most older persons are working to maintain their health by following recommended schedules for cancer screenings, obtaining flu shots, not smoking and taking medicines for chronic conditions. Yet some groups, such as Latinos, have more health problems than average and obtain fewer preventive services,” said lead author Steven P. Wallace, associate director of ...