2016
Personal Project
in collaboration with Riccardo Sabatini and Bruno Bowden
 

So much is written in the human genome — the complete genetic instructions needed to build a human being. To explain its complexity, Riccardo Sabatini invited Craig Venter, the first man to sequence human DNA, to join him on TED 2016 stage.

But as Sabatini finishes the introduction, not one but five people appear, wheeling library carts full of massive volumes.
“Not the man in his flesh,” Sabatini says with a smile. “But, for the first time in history, this is the genome of a specific human, printed page by page, letter by letter — 262,000 pages of information.”

From these 175 books, Sabatini reads a sequence of eight letters — Venter’s eye color — and another that, if just two letters appeared in a different order, would mean he had cystic fibrosis. Now that we have the technology to read the genome, how can we use it to improve our lives?

Using machine learning, Sabatini and his lab at Human Longevity can predict things like height, eye color, skin color and even facial structure based on a person’s genome. Perhaps more interestingly, scientists may soon be able to use the same technology to personalize treatments for diseases. “This is the code of life” Sabatini says. “Whatever we want to do with it, whatever question we want to pose, now is the time to do it.”

So when Riccardo asked me to design the Human Code Enciclopedia, well I couldn’t say no!

With the growing ability to understand the human genome through machine learning and simulation, the next years will open a new chapter in the history of medicine.
An amazing scientist, entrepreneur and good friend Riccardo Sabatini, engaged me in his outstanding and inspiring research project of his lab at Human Longevity that we called The Human Code : the first Human Code Enciclopedia in the world.

Few Articles about the project
FastCo: A few Drops of your blood can tell scientists almost exactly what you look like
Huffington Post (ita): Il genio italiano del DNA
Nova 24 Tech: Ecco l’algoritmo che predice un volto da una goccia di sangue.