Mailund on the Internet

Google Health is up and running. See a review here.

My first thought was: "who would use such a service?"

I don't have much of a "medical history" to keep track of.  I'm not eating any regular medicine and never had, and in any case it is not something I want to try to keep track of myself.

I trust my physician and would want him to figure out what medicine I need, if any.  I want him to keep track of my medical history.  He is the expert, that is why I go to him.  I don't want to second guess experts in a field where I have very little knowledge.

So really, what's the point in using Google Health?

At Next Generation Sequencing I saw a review of a new sequencing technology that allows for long reads, unlike all the other new sequencing methods.  While the other technologies read sequences of up to a hundred base-pairs, this can potentially read thousands.  This is exciting since this longer reads are needed to deal with repetitive regions and since longer reads will enable us to sequence phased chromosomes and not the mix of two chromosomes we usually get.

The review is silent on when we can expect this technology in use or how fast it will be and such, but I hope it is not just vapour-ware.

I've always loved physics, I've just never been smart enough to study it...