J. Craig Venter rose to fame in the field for publishing the first bacterial genome ever decoded, along with a list on gene annotations, in 1995. This achievement kicked off an age of discovery in genetics, with researchers racing to decode the genomes of other pathogens and eventually, animals.
At first, cancer is a quiet disease. Inside the body, cells are aggressively multiplying out of control, changing everything. But on the outside, there's nothing special to see or feel. Not yet. For Guardant co-CEO Helmy Eltoukhy, that invisibility looked like an engineering challenge. What if cancer could be detected early - through blood tests - before you even knew it was there?
With IVF, prospective parents already have options to screen embryos, not just for sex or severe genetic diseases, but increasingly for a full range of genetic traits. Thanks to whole genome sequencing (WGS), the choice isn't science fiction; we can now analyze all 20,000+ human genes in an embryo with better than 99.9 percent accuracy for many mutations and chromosomal problems (assuming parents are willing to forego natural conception, and instead supply their eggs and sperm to a lab for embryo creation and analysis).