I have three kids. All of them like to climb. Margot seems unnaturally compelled to climb things — no matter how imprudent. (She broke her clavicle at age 2 after climbing up to, and falling off of, the kitchen table.) Unfortunately, our San Francisco postage stamp yard has no good places to climb. Since I spent most of my childhood in a tree, the lack of climbable structures for my kids disturbed me. So, during a recent break between jobs, I built a climbing wall in our house. The kids love it and it was a hit at our recent holiday cookie party.

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As many of you know by now, I left Genentech in September to join UC Berkeley as the Chief Scientist of the Genome Commons. I’m part of QB3, the California Institute for Quantitative Biology (no I don’t understand the abbreviation either).

I’m collaborating with Steven Brenner, Jasper Rine, and Lior Pachter at Berkeley, and Robert Nussbaum and Bernie Lo at UCSF, to address the technical, scientific, clinical, and ethical opportunities associated with interpreting genomic data. It’s an exciting time and an exciting place.

To be sure, I’ll be posting a lot more about that here.

How is it that someone like me, i.e. with substantial geek tendencies, goes this long without blogging? At one time, I surely thought that the young whippersnappers were wasting their time with this blogging thing. I mean, get real, who’s gonna read this crap? It turns out lots of people do.

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