Trey Foskett is the co-founder and CEO of Watchmaker Genomics in Boulder. Sequencing the first human genome took ten years and $3 billion. Twenty-five years later, that cost has fallen roughly 100,000-fold: a drop that outpaced Moore's Law, and one most people outside the field never noticed.
Watchmaker doesn't sequence DNA. It makes the enzymes that sequencing companies use to do it. Cheaper, more precise testing means more testing, and more demand for what Watchmaker makes. It also moves genomics out of the research lab and into routine cancer detection. Trey and Dan also get into gene editing, designer genes, and what changes when genetics becomes something money can buy.
Tom Cech won a Nobel at CU Boulder, and life sciences companies grew up along the Front Range, until larger pharmaceutical companies bought them and the work left with the buyers. Trey is rebuilding it here. Plus: why life is written in exactly four letters, and whether its ingredients arrived from somewhere else.
Learn more about Trey's work in genomics: https://watchmakergenomics.com
Order Dan's book — Bandwidth: The Untold Story of Ambition, Deception, and Innovation that Shaped the Internet Age and Dot-Com Boom: dan-caruso.com/book
Listen to Dan’s song Stretch: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/dancaruso/stretch
Check out music by Jason Mendelson (Jace Allen): https://www.youtube.com/@jaceallen
To nominate a founder or yourself as a future guest speaker, email: contact@loudbearproductions.com