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Larry Gold is Professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, University of Colorado at Boulder and Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board at SomaLogic, Inc., in Boulder. Larry trained at Yale, Connecticut, and Rockefeller. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. In his spare time he founded Synergen, NeXstar, and SomaLogic. He holds about 100 patents. He is one of the most creative thinkers in the area of molecular medicine, and certainly the most provocative speaker between Chicago and La Jolla. |
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The Topic
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Larry aims to go beyond the human genome project, even before it's completed. His idea is, We can know what your genes are, but what are they doing lately? We each have about 30,000 genes, but each cell expresses only some of them, and the ones expressed (that is, made into useful proteins) vary from cell to cell and moment to moment, depending on demand, stress, sickness, and so on. Also, the version of each gene I got from my parents may be different--and its proteins function differently--from the ones you got. Larry thinks the future of medicine depends on being able to take snapshots of protein expression. Maybe these will tell us what diseases you're susceptible to; what drugs will work better than others; what toxins to avoid; what nutrients to seek out. Do you see this as utopian, or do you also see some ethical issues? Come to the Café prepared to discuss and challenge Larry and the rest of us. The best way to learn about this topic is to look at a paper Larry and his colleagues published recently in Medical Laboratory Observer called: Driving Forces in Cancer Diagnostics.
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