I think it was the third or fourth year of the original GSAC Hilton Head conference. We were as a community debating whether or not to begin a global effort to sequence all the genes from a single person. I think the word 'genome' had not quite been coined yet. At that meeting there was a panel discussion, which turned into a debate of sorts with the audience involved about whether or not such a project should be started. Wally Gilbert stood up and explained that we must, and further prophetically explained that new technologies would emerge that would drive the cost of sequencing dramatically down in a similar fashion as the semiconductor industry. Those were the days of manual slab gel sequencing. My recollection was that his argument sealed the debate, at least in my mind. The concept of sequencing a genome as inexpensively as we can now seemed so far fetched at the time. And yet, Wally foresaw all of this. I believe that session of the conference may have been recorded or filmed, and wonder if those film archives still exist. If so, who might have this pivotal and arguably treasured moment in history?
-
CRISPR/Cas9 sparked the gene editing revolution for both research and therapeutics.1 But this system still showed severe issues that limited its applications. The most prominent were the heavy reliance on PAM sequences, delivery limitations, double-stranded breaks that prompt unintended edits and cell death, and editing inefficiency (both in targeting and in knock-in reliability).
Despite this, “CRISPR helped turn genome editing from a specialized technique into...07-31-2026, 11:01 AM -
Proteomics platforms are evolving rapidly, with advances in mass spectrometry and affinity-based approaches expanding what researchers can detect and at what scale. As the field moves toward deeper proteome coverage and clinical applications, scientists face an increasingly complex landscape of tools. This article will explore how researchers are navigating these choices to find the right platform for their work.
The systematic characterization of the human proteome has...07-20-2026, 11:48 AM -
Genomics studies in neuroscience face a special challenge due to the brain’s complexity and scarcity of samples. Mapping changes in cell type and state using conventional next-generation sequencing methods remains challenging. Advances in technologies like single-cell sequencing, spatial transcriptomics, and long-read sequencing have opened the door to deeper studies of the brain and diseases like Alzheimer’s, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and schizophrenia.
...07-09-2026, 11:10 AM