Maurice Hilleman had a hypothesis about flu pandemics. In a nutshell, his idea is that they occur every 68 years for each individual subtype. After 68 years, the majority of people who were previously exposed will have died off, leaving a totally naive population.

This is related to the idea of herd immunity -- that a population is essentially immune if the number of immune people is above some certain threshold. Think of it this way: if 90% of people are immune to a disease, and a person on average spreads this disease to 10 people, the transmission rate will be linear. If you pass below a threshold of, for example 80% though, it will become rapidly exponential.

After 68 years, the average turnover time of a generation, the numerator of immune people ends up decreasing, and this is why we get these cyclic pandemics.

While everyone knows about the H1N1 Spanish Flu (the same subtype as this new Mexican flu) of 1919, much fewer know about the 1978 pandemic of the same type. This is what we should be thinking about.

So, one might think, well, 68 years + 1978 = 2046. This pandemic is way too early. The problem is, however, that the 1978 pandemic was extremely mild -- it itself struck about 10 years too early. Thus, not many people were infected, leaving the numerator much smaller than it should be.

The other problem is the population explosion, especially in third world countries. This has the effect of drastically increasing the denominator of that herd immunity ratio.

Because of these two reasons, I suspect that the herd immunity ratio has already passed below the threshold needed to protect us from a pandemic.

The funny thing is, just when "I Am Legend" was released, a news release came out from Yale saying that they were going to cure brain cancer using a virus.

The best part? The virus is "distantly related to rabies."

While they may have only recently published the article, people in bioinformatics have been going crazy about Pacific Biosciences for at least a year.

I recently went to a series of talks on Next Generation Sequencing, and there was an interesting chart that showed that when you factor in sequencing cost, read length, and accuracy, high throughput sequencing is actually *outperforming* Moore's law by a factor of 5 or so!

Regarding the error rate, just a few years ago, 454 had error rates of almost 5% but with redundancy it became negligible. Since then, error rates have gone down dramatically.

Also, an Anonymous Coward up there is wrong -- (0.993)^3 is *less* than 0.993. It should be (1 - 0.993) vs. (1 - 0.993)^3. I don't know why it's been modded to informative. Check your math!!

What I am extremely curious about is the "job application" section of the website. What kind of jobs are we talking about, do you think?