Computer people love powers of two. Doubling or halving. We’ve done the beginning (1983), middle (2004) and end (2025) of our timeline, and then the first half of the first half (1993). Now on to the first half of the second half.
By 2015, the Alan & Priscilla Oppenheimer Foundation had been working with on the Genome for the Rest of Us since 2007. We had helped the Personal Genome Project sponsor a couple conferences, and kicked off an effort to sequence 1000 human genomes by funding the first one ourselves. But we were all just getting started.
In his 2015 State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama announced the Precision Medicine Initiative:
I want the country that eliminated polio and mapped the human genome to lead a new era of medicine… So tonight, I’m launching a new Precision Medicine Initiative…to give all of us access to the personalized information we need to keep ourselves and our families healthier. We can do this.
Barack Obama, January 20, 2015
The announcement was followed by a White House ceremony kicking off the project, with PGP members in attendance.
NIH… will launch a national, patient-powered research cohort of one million or more Americans…[who] will have the opportunity to contribute diverse sources of data—including medical records; profiles of the patient’s genes…
Barack Obama, January 30, 2015
Essentially one million genomes! Ten years later (the present Present), that effort, now known as “All of Us,” is close to those one million participants. Our little family foundation, in its own little way, has helped sparked a successful country-wide effort. Now that’s distributing the Future!
