J. Craig Venter, Ph.D., is regarded as one of the leading scientists of the 21st century for his numerous invaluable contributions to genomic research. He is Founder, Chairman, and CEO of the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), a not-for-profit, research organization with approximately 300 scientists and staff dedicated to human, microbial, plant, synthetic and environmental genomic research, and the exploration of social and ethical issues in genomics.Read more
La Jolla geneticist J. Craig Venter has hired one of the world’s top computer scientists to help him try to prolong and improve people’s lives by deciphering hundreds of thousands of human genomes.
Franz Och was lured away from Mountain View-based Google, where he has been guiding Google Translate, a service that is capable of translating more than 80 languages. The software has more than 200 million active users and translates everything from Yiddish to Swahili to English.
Och, 42, will help find ways to make it faster and easier for scientists to sift through the extraordinary amounts of data produced by sequencing. He will serve as chief data scientist at Human Longevity, Inc., a La Jolla company that Venter founded earlier this year to conduct the largest sequencing effort ever undertaken. The company will initially sequence 40,000 human genomes a year, then ramp up to 100,000.
“I basically did a search and tracked down the person who led the Google Translate effort, which I see as similar to the challenges we face with genomics,” said Venter, who helped lead, and speed up, the Human Genome Project.
“The six billion letters of the genome represents one of the biggest translation issues ever. Your genetic code translates into your biological code which translates into you. We need to use machine learning to find associations between genes that mere mortals can’t find from staring at the data. It’s too complex.”
Venter also needs help deciphering the tremendous amount of data that will be generated by examing microbiomes, or the countless microbes found on the human body. Scientists believe that such microbes can affect people’s health in ways large and small.
Och will operate out of Mountain View rather than moving to La Jolla.
“San Diego is phenomenal place for recruiting biologically-oriented scientists,” Venter said Tuesday. “But the Silicon Valley for people into computation science. So rather than try to convince a few hundred people to love to La Jolla, we’re just going to build on the talent base in the Silican Valley.”
Computational scientists also work at Human Longevity in La Jolla, and a facility Venter is opening in Singapore.
In a statement, Och said, “We’re going to need the best and brightest from the areas of computer science, machine learning and big data generation and interpretation as well as those from biology, genomics and bioinformatics to reach a new level of understanding of this massive database.
“I look forward to working with Craig and the team at HLI to enhance our understanding of human biology, to better manage the healthy aging process and thus increase the healthy human lifespan.”
“The six billion letters of the genome represents one of the biggest translation issues ever. Your genetic code translates into your biological code which translates into you. We need to use machine learning to find associations between genes that mere mortals can’t find from staring at the data. It’s too complex.”
J. Craig Venter, Ph.D., is regarded as one of the leading scientists of the 21st century for his numerous invaluable contributions to genomic research. He is Founder, Chairman, and CEO of the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), a not-for-profit, research organization with approximately 300 scientists and staff dedicated to human, microbial, plant, synthetic and environmental genomic research, and the exploration of social and ethical issues in genomics.Read more
Och, 42, will help find ways to make it faster and easier for scientists to sift through the extraordinary amounts of data produced by sequencing. He will serve as chief data scientist at Human Longevity, Inc., a La Jolla company that Venter founded earlier this year to conduct the largest sequencing effort ever undertaken. The company will initially sequence 40,000 human genomes a year, then ramp up to 100,000.
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