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In early June 2011, at a bioinformatics conference outside of Cambridge, U.K., University of British Columbia epidemiologist Jennifer Gardy watched a Twitter storm take place. “The world’s tiny population of genomic epidemiologists is sitting in this lecture hall,” she remembers thinking—and they all seemed to be firing off tweets as fast as they could compose them. Just weeks earlier, reports had surfaced that a new and deadly variant of E. coli was infecting people in parts of Germany. While the epidemiologists were gathered together in the hall, researchers from the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) announced on Twitter that they had just publicly released an unassembled sequence of the strain’s genome. By sheer coincidence, the geneticists at the conference had just been discussing whole-genome sequencing as ...
