Aggregated News
It's the ultimate baseline study — an effort to collect the fullest picture of what a healthy human being should look like.
The project, which is in its early stages, is being run by Andrew Conrad, a molecular biologist known for developing affordable, high-volume tests for HIV in blood-plasma donations. His team now consists of nearly 100 experts from fields such as physiology, biochemistry, optics, imaging, and molecular biology.
Called the Baseline Project, it's different from other mass medical and genomic projects in that it's seeking to collect much larger and broader sets of new data. The ultimate goal is to make medicine more preventative. To get there, the researchers will collect anonymous genetic and molecular information from 175 people, and eventually thousands.
"With any complex system, the notion has always been there to proactively address problems," notes Conrad in the Wall Street Journal. "That's not revolutionary. We are just asking the question: If we really wanted to be proactive, what would we need to know? You need to know what the fixed, well-running thing should look...