Eric Lander
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"Eric Steven Lander" is a Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), former member of the Whitehead Institute, and founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard who has devoted his career to realizing the promise of the human genome for medicine. He is co-chair of U.S. President Barack Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

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That's a very specific prediction.

Now folks say 'I believe in this Internet world and I want to disclose my data before publishing ... but don't scoop me on my own project,'.

Having a sequence of the human genome is good, but our ability to interpret it was limited. The mouse sequence provides, for the first time, an ability to determine what matters and what doesn't in the human genome.

Evolution is a way of understanding the world that continues to hold up day after day to scientific tests.

About 99 percent of genes in humans have counterparts in the mouse. Eighty percent have identical, one-to-one counterparts.

We're not going to stand up and say that these 14 things make us human, ... But it's not trivial to be able to say, 'Here is an inventory of the most important differences, and now go at it and figure out which of these differences contain the signatures of what is distinctively human.'

The goal is not just butterfly collecting or mammal collecting to simply describe mammals. All of that comparative work across mammals is about informing the human genome for medicine. Until we actually understand all the working parts within our genome, we won't really be able to practice the most informed medicine.

Evolutionary analysis is a handmaiden to human medicine.

This is telling us about those changes that make us human.