It's as good as it gets

I'm here at CFSAN (Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, a part of the US FDA) and at NIH this week for some lab work, a Disease Outbreak Detection meeting, and oh, right, Health and Human Services Secretary Sibelius's announcement of the HHSInnovates award.  Yes, Agilent Technologies, CFSAN and UCDavis and the 100K Pathogen Genome Project is the Secretary's Pick.  There will be photos and of course, something to hang on the wall.  24 of us associated with the project celebrated with house wine and spaghetti at a local restaurant, and a jolly time was had by all.  Since I know weI won't be winning a Nobel or even a Lasker award any time soon, it's as good as it gets, we all agreed at the bar afterwards. 

By the way, if you hold a foreign passport, please be aware they won't let you in the building without 5 days to check you out.   Here is Steffen, enjoying the HHS lobby!

Wow! It's like stuffing the ballot box for the All-Stars Game!

I have been working on this initiative all year. The 100K Pathogen Genome Project is a joint collaboration between Agilent Technologies, UC Davis and the FDA to collect and sequence 100,000 pathogen genomes and get the data into a public database. Acquiring this information will allow the rapid molecular identification of food-borne pathogens to vastly improve the security of the food supply, instead of using traditional microbiological methods almost a century old. We are a finalist for the Health and Human Services Innovation award. If you click on the link below, you get to the voting page for People’s choice award. Ours is the center bottom rectangle that says 100K Genome Project. Please go, look around, and if you are impressed, we will take your 5-star vote.


Thanks. It has been a fun ride. I’ll be at the ceremony Sept. 24. Wish us luck!

http://www.hhs.gov/open/initiatives/hhsinnovates/index.html