Sandia National Labs and the Human Genome Project (thinkdrafts)

submitted ago by MercurysBall2

Sandia Labs Find Vulnerability in Personalized Medicine Software https://healthitsecurity.com/news/sandia-labs-find-vulnerability-in-personalized-medicine-software

July 05, 2019 - Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have discovered a vulnerability in personalized medicine software used for genomic analysis.

The vulnerability could open DNA-based medical diagnostic tools to a “man-in-the-middle” attack, in which a hacker intercepts communication between two parties either to eavesdrop or modify communications between them.

In this case, the two parties are a remote government server with standardized human genome data and a user of the Burrows-Wheeler Aligner (BWA) program, which is popular among personalized genomics researchers.

Sandia Labs explained that personalized genomics research involves a two-step process: sequencing the entire genetic content from a patient’s cells and comparing that sequence to a standardized human genome. By comparing those results, physicians can identify genetic changes in a patient that are linked to a particular disease. The researchers found the vulnerability at the point where the BWA program imports the standardized genome from government servers, resulting in the sequence traveling over insecure communications channels.

Weapons lab to develop Celera's new supercomputer - https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-spotlight-20010126-01

Published: 26 January 2001

LONDON Craig Venter, the CEO of Celera Genomics - which is on the verge of publishing the sequence of the human genome - has signed an agreement with Sandia National Laboratory in the US to develop the most powerful computer in the world within four years - and it'll be used for biology.

At the same time, Sandia will be working on a similar machine to simulate the full three-dimensional impact of a nuclear weapons explosion, due for delivery to the US government by 2004. Sandia National Laboratory is a US Department of Energylaboratory, owned by the DoE but operated by the Sandia corporation. It is one of the three US weapons laboratories using supercomputers for the government's 'stockpile stewardship programme', which ensures the safety and reliability of the US nuclear stockpile in the absence of nuclear testing.

"The assembly of the human genome last June took 20,000 hours of central processing unit time" Venter said at the announcement of the agreement in Washington on 19 January. But to take the research further, "even though we have one of the biggest computers outside government," it had become clear that the biggest limitation would be computer power. And, said Venter, Celera has found the expertise it needs - in Sandia together with the personal computer company Compaq. Compaq has already made a name for itself in biological supercomputing. It bought Digital Equipment Corporation - with its alpha chip technology - two years ago and provided the computers for the Celera human genome work.

According to Sandia's President, Paul Robinson, "we in the nuclear weapons community felt for many years that nothing could be more complex than nuclear physics and weapons... But I'm now convinced that nothing equals the complexity of bioscience and the human genome, and the challenges ahead. It's really important for us to have an opportunity to participate in this exciting work."

The director of the Celera project at Sandia, Grant Heffelfinger, echoes this. "It's tremendously exciting. It's the opportunity of a lifetime. It's like physics in the 1920s. Like the dawn of quantum mechanics. All of the fundamental questions are being challenged and assailed, we're just beginning to have some of the capacity to find the answers, and we find that the more you learn we see how much there is to know and how profound the answers are going to be."

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MercurysBall2 ago

From the Edge website: https://www.edge.org/memberbio/j_craig_venter

DR. J. CRAIG VENTER is regarded as one of the leading scientists of the 21st century for his invaluable contributions in genomic research, most notably for the first sequencing and analysis of the human genome published in 2001 and the most recent and most complete sequencing of his diploid human genome in 2007.

He is Co-Founder, Chairman, CEO, Co-Chief Scientific Officer of Synthetic Genomics, Inc; as well as Founder, President and Chairman of the J. Craig Venter Institute. He was also the founder of Human Genome Sciences, Diversa Corporation and Celera Genomics. He and his teams have sequenced more than 300 organisms including human, fruit fly, mouse, rat, and dog as well as numerous microorganisms and plants.

https://www.jcvi.org/about/j-craig-venter

Dr. Venter also is a co-founder of Synthetic Genomics, Inc. (SGI) and Human Longevity, Inc. (HLI). SGI is a privately held company developing products and solutions including sustainable bio-fuels, vaccines, biotherapeutics and transplantable organs. HLI is a genomic-based, health intelligence company empowering proactive healthcare.

Dr. Venter began his formal education after a tour of duty as a Navy Corpsman in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968. After earning both a Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry and a PhD in Physiology and Pharmacology from the University of California at San Diego, he was appointed professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo and the Roswell Park Cancer Institute. In 1984, he moved to the National Institutes of Health campus where he developed Expressed Sequence Tags or ESTs, a revolutionary new strategy for rapid gene discovery.

https://syntheticgenomics.com/

https://www.humanlongevity.com/

Dr. He has been serving as Executive Chairman of Human Longevity Inc since July 2019. Prior to HLI, Dr. He was the CEO of OriGene Technologies, Inc. and remains Chairman of the Board of Directors. He also is the founder and General Partner of Emerging Technology Partners, LLC (ETP), a life sciences focused venture fund established since 2000. Dr. He has been involved in founding or funding over 60 biotech companies throughout his career, some of which went on to be acquired by significantly larger firms. In the earlier part of his career, Dr. He was one of the first few scientists at Human Genome Sciences, and prior to that, was a research fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital and Mayo Clinic. Dr. He is an author to more than 30 research publications and inventor of over 32 issued patents. Dr. He received his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from Baylor College of Medicine and received an M.B.A. degree from the Wharton School.

MercurysBall2 ago

Dr Venter is another transhumanist https://hpluspedia.org/wiki/J._Craig_Venter

https://www.edge.org/event/edge-master-class-2009-george-church-j-craig-venter-a-short-course-on-synthetic-genomics

On July 24, 2009, a small group of scientists, entrepreneurs, cultural impresarios and journalists that included architects of some of the leading transformative companies of our time (Microsoft, Google, Facebook, PayPal), arrived at the Andaz Hotel on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, to be offered a glimpse, guided by George Church and Craig Venter, of a future far stranger than Mr. Huxley had been able to imagine in 1948.

In this future — whose underpinnings, as Drs. Church and Venter demonstrated, are here already — life as we know it is transformed not by the error catastrophe of radiation damage to our genetic processes, but by the far greater upheaval caused by discovering how to read genetic sequences directly into computers, where the code can be replicated exactly, manipulated freely, and translated back into living organisms by writing the other way. "We can program these cells as if they were an extension of the computer," George Church announced, and proceeded to explain just how much progress has already been made. ...