The National Institutes of Health is getting into the action with its “skip the post-doc” Early Independence Awards to help free exceptional young minds from the academic treadmill. Jimmy Lin’s Rare Genomics Institute is crowdfunding genomic sequencing for patients with rare diseases — and there’s much discussion about crowdfunding’s utility in life sciences. Crowdsourcing is gaining traction in life sciences, from FoldIt’s online protein folding games to Transparency Life Sciences‘ crowdsourced clinical study design.

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“The [genome] map opens our understanding of the organism for the first time,” says Jimmy Lin, a computational genomics researcher onfaculty at Washington University in St. Louis. Lin is part of the team that sequenced the human genome at Johns Hopkins. “Like the sequencing of the human genome, endless possibilities are now open. However, further work is needed to decipher the genome to possibly modify it for pesticide resistance, flavor enhancement, longer survival, etc.”

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