In the land of the Gene Titans

Apologies for the lack of posts recently. I've been traveling and busy with meetings. For my own recollection, here is a partial list of places I've been in the past weeks.

Illumina (San Diego)
Ancestry (~10M genomes! San Francisco)
23andMe (~5M genomes! Mountain View)
OpenAI (machines beat pro human teams in complex Dota 2 game! San Francisco)
Affymetrix (Santa Clara)
Healdsburg, Sonoma (Talk at meeting of Oligarchs :-)
Soros Fund Management (Talk at leadership retreat, Museum of Arts and Design, NYC)

These GeneTitans are part of the Affy lab that did all of the genotyping for the UK Biobank project. The footprint for this kind of lab is shockingly small: ~6k samples per week per machine and ~10 machines means millions of individual genotypes per year. Illumina produces similar arrays/readers and a hundred square meters of lab space is enough to process millions of samples per year for DTC genomics companies like 23andMe and Ancestry.

We may have a lab like this soon at MSU ;-)