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Sergey Brin donates DNA, dollars to Parkinson’s study
Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who carries a gene mutation that predisposes him to Parkinson’s disease, is contributing his DNA and millions of dollars to research into the condition’s genetic basis.
The study will be conducted by 23andMe, the website co-founded by his wife, Anne Wojcicki, which already harnesses users’ DNA to help them understand health risks and other genetic traits.
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(requires Java)MAP HINTS: Click expands a name. Control+Click centers map on a name. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For advanced tools choose Tools > Options from the menu at top. More help. Not seeing the maps? Please go here to check for the latest version of Java.The site hopes to recruit 10,000 people with Parkinson’s. By comparing their genetic information with that of healthy people already in 23andMe’s growing database, researchers hope to find genetic variations linked to the neurological condition.
Sergey BrinPartners include the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, which was started by the actor with the disease, and the nonprofit Parkinson’s Institute. About 1.5 million Americans have Parkinson’s, a progressive neurological disease which interferes with movement and speech.
Brin, 35, who Forbes ranks as the world’s 32nd richest person, told the New York Times that he would pay for most of the study’s costs, although he declined to say what that was.
“I kind of give myself 50-50 odds of getting Parkinson’s in 20 or so years, 25 years,” he said. “But I also give it a 50-50 shot of medicine catching up to be able to deal with it.”
Last fall, at Google’s Zeitgeist meeting, Brin revealed for the first time that his mother, Eugenia Brin, a former NASA computer engineer, had contracted Parkinson’s, and that he also carried the gene mutation that sharply increases his risk of developing the disease.
When a member of the audience asked whether it wouldn’t be better to be ignorant of such things, Brin appeared taken aback.
As a result of having that information, Brin said he was now in a position to encourage research about Parkinson’s and to take steps to lower his personal risk.
A profile in The Economist described his reaction as part and parcel of his approach to the world.
In effect, Brin said he regarded his mutation of LRRK2 as a bug in his personal code, and thus as no different from the bugs in computer code that Google’s engineers fix every day. By helping himself, he can therefore help others as well. By helping himself, he can therefore help others as well. He considers himself lucky.
The moment in some ways sums up Mr Brin’s approach to life. Like Mr. Page, he has a vision, as Google’s motto puts it, of making all the world’s information “universally accessible and useful.”
Brin’s faith in the transformative power of accessible information comes in part out of his family’s experience in the Soviet Union. His parents, Russian Jews, were barred from pursuing careers in physics and astronomy.
After his family emigrated to the U.S. when he was 6, Brin followed in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps by studying mathematics at the University of Maryland, double-majoring in computer science.
He befriended fellow whiz kid Larry Page when he enrolled at Stanford to get a Ph.D in computer science. The two crammed their dorm room with computers and applied Brin’s data-mining system to build a superior search engine.
The program became so popular at Stanford that they suspended their doctoral studies to start Google in a rented garage, owned coincidentally by Wojcicki’s sister.
23andMe also grew out of Eugenia Brin’s diagnosis, according to the Times. Wojcicki, a biotech analyst, met co-founder Linda Avey because Avey was running a genetic study about Parkinson’s disease. Together, they came up with the idea of a website which would let people analyze and compare their genetic makeup (and whose name refers to the 23 pairs of chromosomes every human being carries).
Google already has invested $3.9 million in 23andMe, which is also based in Mountain View, CA.
Wojcicki told the Times she hopes to use the Parkinson’s study as a basis for future research collaborations. “There’s a huge opportunity for us if we can make research more efficient,” she said.
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This post is tagged with: 23andMe, Anne Wojcicki, Eugenia Brin, Google Inc., Internet, Linda Avey, Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, Parkinson’s Institute, Philanthropy, Sergey Brin
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Edward Liddy caught in the eye of AIG stormMarch 15, 2009 at 9:42am
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Sergey Brin Donates Dna Dollars to Parkinsons Study
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Anna Nicole Smiths Boyfriend Doctors Charged in Drug Case
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Harvard Law ensconced at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
To save on travel expenses, the Harvard Law School Class of 1991 might as well have its reunion this year at the White House.
The best-known graduate of the class, President Barack Obama, is both working and living there, and he’s shown no reluctance to hire his classmates.
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Their classmate Michael B.G. Froman is a deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for international economic security affairs.
David Kris, also ‘91, has been picked to head the National Security Division at the Department of Justice. And Thomas J. Perrelli, ‘91, has been nominated to be associate attorney general.
The 1991 graduates are just part of what the Harvard Law Record has called the “avalanche” of Harvard law alumni who have joined or are soon to join the Obama administration.
The best-known member of this group is Michelle Obama, the First Lady, and a 1988 Harvard Law graduate.
Daniel J. Meltzer, ‘75, and a professor at the law school during Obama’s time there, is the president’s principal deputy counsel.
Michael J. Gottlieb and Danielle Gray, 2003 graduates, are associate counsels to the president. Blake Roberts, Class of 2006, will be a deputy associate counsel.
Samantha Power, ‘99, is serving on the National Security Council. She won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction in 2003 for A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.
Power had been a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, as well as an adviser (sometimes controversial) to the Obama presidential campaign.
Todd Stern, ‘75, is the special envoy for climate change.
And Jocelyn Frye, ‘88, a law school classmate and friend of Michelle Obama, is serving as director of policy and projects for the First Lady and as a deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy.
Obama has nominated Elena Kagan, Harvard Law ‘86, to be the U.S. solicitor general. Kagan was dean of the law school. David W. Ogden, ‘81, has been nominated to be deputy attorney general.
One Harvard Law School graduate and 1991 alum not working at the White House is Bradford A. Berenson, a Republican and a former associate White House Council in the George W. Bush administration.
While at Harvard, Obama and Berenson worked together at the Harvard Law Review, Obama serving as president, Berenson as Supreme Court Editor.
According to Berenson, Obama may have learned how to mediate competing factions while running a Law Review staff that was divided not only by politics but also by legal philosophies.
“You know who the people are who, despite their politics, can reach across and be friendly to and make friends with folks who have different views,” Berenson told Frontline on PBS last year. “And Barack very much fell into the latter category.”
Obama will probably feel right at home at cabinet meetings, as the room will be full of lawyers:
There’s Vice President Joe Biden (Syracuse Law), Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. (Columbia University), Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack (Albany), Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano (University of Virginia), Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar (Michigan) and Secretary of State Hillary R. Clinton (Yale University).
Gary Locke, the nominee to be secretary of commerce, graduated from Boston University Law School.
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Edward Liddy caught in the eye of AIG stormMarch 15, 2009 at 9:42am
AIG has been described as the company where federal dollars go to die. It may also be a career killer for Edward M. Liddy.
Harvard Law Ensconced at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave
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Charges against Madoff leave many unanswered questions
Barring a change of heart, Bernard L. Madoff will plead guilty tomorrow to running a massive Ponzi scheme for at least a quarter century that defrauded thousands of people in virtually every corner of the globe.
Based on 11 charges unveiled for the first time last night, the disgraced financier would face a maximum sentence of 150 years in jail, and required restitution and fines of as much as $170 billion. That is the amount prosecutors believe moved through his accounts during the years he conducted the fraud, although there is no indication that Madoff has anywhere close to that sum.
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(requires Java)MAP HINTS: Click expands a name. Control+Click centers map on a name. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For advanced tools choose Tools > Options from the menu at top. More help. Not seeing the maps? Please go here to check for the latest version of Java.Yet the criminal information leaves the biggest questions about the scam unanswered – whether family members and colleagues were involved, where most of the money went, and what, if any, knowledge those running several large feeder funds may have had.
Lev L. Dassin, the acting United States attorney in Manhattan, said Tuesday that his staff was still unraveling the fraud to determine who besides Madoff might have helped.
“The filing of these charges does not end the matter,” Dassin said in a statement.
Dassin said he has made no agreement to seek leniency in return for Madoff’s guilty plea or his cooperation in the investigation.
The prosecutor’s release of charges offered some fresh information about how they believe Madoff conducted his scam. For starters, they up the total pricetag from his $50-billion estimate to nearly $65 billion – the amount that thousands of customers believed they had in their accounts at the time of his arrest.
And they date the fraud to as far back as the early 1980s, when they allege that Madoff assembled an ill-trained and inexperienced clerical staff, directed them to “generate false and fraudulent documents,” told lies and supplied phony records to regulators and shuffled hundreds of millions of dollars from bank to bank to create the illusion of active trading, according to the criminal information.
For the first time, they disclose that some investors were treated differently – a select group were offered returns as high as 45 percent, according to the criminal information
And they raise questions about the supposed separation between Madoff’s 17th-floor investment operation and the supposedly legitimate wholesale stock trading operation that his sons ran. Prosecutors charge that from at least 2002 through 2008, more than $250 million from investors in the Ponzi scheme was transferred into the operations of those other businesses.
They also allege that Madoff transferred money from his firm’s London office “to purchase property and services for the personal use and benefit” of himself, his family members and associates.
Madoff has been free on $10 million bail, but confined to his apartment, since his arrest in December. It is not clear whether the government will seek to have his bail revoked if he pleads guilty on Thursday.
The charges against him include securities fraud, investment adviser fraud, mail fraud, wire fraud, three counts of money laundering, false statements, perjury, false filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and theft from an employee benefit plan.
Even if Madoff pleads guilty as expected, the judge said he will not be sentenced for several months.
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Harvard Law ensconced at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.March 12, 2009 at 11:55am
To save on travel expenses, the Harvard Law School Class of 1991 might as well have its reunion this year at the White House.
Prince Charles Burnishes Green Credentials
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Law School Friendship Brings Jocelyn Frye to the White House
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1 Comments
#1. MURALIDHARA ACHARYA 03.14.2009
Mr. Brin is doing a commendable job. Any way, I would like to give him piece of my mind. If he undertook this to include developing or under developed nations this would have made more sense.
Best,
Muralidhara Acharya
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