Tuesday, December 31, 2002

bookmark: connotea :: del.icio.us ::digg ::furl ::reddit ::yahoo::

The New York Times To Study Disease, Britain Plans a Genetic Census
[requires 'free' registration]

"In 2003, Britain plans to undertake the world's most ambitious study of the origins of disease.

Looking forward to the day when people will know their genetic makeups and request a precise picture of their risks of developing various diseases, the study organizers plan to assemble a database of medical information about 500,000 Britons, including their DNA."

redux [11.08.00]
Stanford Medical Informatics Preprint Archive The Interactions Between Clinical Informatics and Bioinformatics: A Case Study

"For the past decade, Stanford Medical Informatics has combined clinical informatics and bioinformatics research and training in an explicit way. The interest in applying informatics techniques to both clinical problems and problems in basic science can be traced to the Dendral project in the 1960s. Having bioinformatics and clinical informatics in the same academic unit is still somewhat unusual and can lead to clashes of clinical and basic science cultures. Nevertheless, the benefits of this organization have recently become clear, as the landscape of academic medicine in the next decades has begun to emerge. The author provides examples of technology transfer between clinical informatics and bioinformatics that illustrate how they complement each other."

MICHAEL KRAUTHAMMER, M.D.: PhD Student, Department Medical Informatics Columbia University, NY Medical Informatics in 10 Years: Towards Biomedical Informatics and its subspecialties

"In his article "The promises of health care" J.H. Bemmel writes that "some 25 years ago, there was no shortage of optimism about expert systems in health care...it becomes clear that perhaps the early researchers were overenthusiastic, many challenges lie ahead, much fundamental research still has to be done."

Is therefore only wise not to look too far ahead, not to be too overenthusiastic again. 10 years ahead seems to be a good pick. A white paper by the American College of Informatics published recently made predictions for the year 2008, a year "not so far in the future as to be ungrounded in current realities""

"The future brings not only new innovations and applications: It will also affect Medical Informatics as a discipline:

• Its imminent merger with bioinformatics
• the emergence of sub-disciplines in medical informatics."

redux [06.07.00]
Stanford Medical Informatics Preprint Archive Bioinformatics in Support of Molecular Medicine

"Basic biological science has always had an impact on clinical medicine (and clinical medical information systems), and is creating a new generation of epidemiologic, diagnostic, prognostic, and treatment modalities. Bioinformatics efforts that appear to be wholly geared towards basic science are likely to become relevant to clinical informatics in the coming decade. For example, DNA sequence information and sequence annotations will appear in the medical chart with increasing frequency. The algorithms developed for research in bioinformatics will soon become part of clinical information systems. In this paper, I briefly review the intellectual roots of bioinformatics and how the field has evolved in the last few years. Fortunately, a core set of scientific paradigms have provided a focus to the field. Even in this short period, however, there has been a change in the nature of the questions being asked and the types of experiments being attempted. These changes are consistently leading bioinformatics towards problems of clinical relevance. Some molecular biology information systems already have important clinical implications. I will discuss the differences in the culture and approach to science of clinical informatics and bioinformatics, but will argue that the two disciplines share important intellectual challenges which make them very closely allied fields (despite the cultural differences). Finally, I will identify a few areas common to both disciplines where developments in one field may help catalyze faster progress in the other. For example, useful database integration technologies have (arguably) matured more rapidly within bioinformatics than in clinical informatics. At the same time, clinical informatics embraced the idea of controlled terminologies relatively early, and offers lessons to those in bioinformatics attempting similar tasks."

redux [05.15.00]
The New York Times Who Owns Your Genes?
[requires 'free' registration]

""I just wanted to do something good," Mr. Fuchs said. "But once money came into the picture, why not have it be shared with me?"

These days more and more patients are asking the same question. Laboratories offer tests for more than 700 human genes, with more being discovered almost daily. And, for almost every gene, some medical institution or some company owns a patent on its use.

"The value of patients' tissues has potentially gone up enormously," said Dr. Barry Eisenstein, the vice president for science and technology at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. But, Dr. Eisenstein said, patients whose cells provided the genes that have been patented are almost never compensated."