Big guns turn sights on cancer-causing genes

In the heart of London, researchers are splitting apart the building blocks of life and working towards a cure for cancer. The Biomedical Research Centre, run by King’s College Hospital and Guy's and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, has a genomic sequencing unit that genotypes tissue from patients with cancer and other diseases …

[Anonymous Coward]

IT!

Because we are behind all scientific progress now. And we can save lives. For once, I am proud to be part of the IT world.

[AbortRetryFail]

Environmentally friendly???

“One major point of the design was to be as environmentally friendly as possible,” says Julian Fielden, managing director at OCF, the systems integrator for the project.

Huh? Sod that! The major point of the design should be to store terabytes (if not petabytes) of data, and then analyse that data in such a way that may bring us closer to a cure for cancer.

I'm absolutely sick and fed up to the back teeth of all this environment and carbon footprint malarky. If the system is environmentally friendly then it's a bonus, but to make that a major design goal is just crazy.

[Mark Shaffer]

Ironic Position

... from my perspective at least. In my own case (multiple myeloma), there are people having the suspect mutations but not the disease itself. Evidently, the malignancy must be triggered by additional environmental factors (although admittedly no one can say exactly what these are). There is a strong suspicion that environmental degradation may account for the increasing incidence and declining diagnosis ages seen over the past couple of decades. Again I am speaking only about the one form of cancer that I happen to know something about.

[Dyip Blog.OCF]

KCL photos

A loud-hailer icon seems only right for a PR man. You can see more photos (including the genomics sequencing machines, storage, Biomedical Research Centre, etc.) from the deployment at King's College London here, http://blog.ocf.co.uk/?p=701