This is really a magic era for software. We can use computers to simulate so many different things. So every person has a DNA sequence that's 3 billion letters long. That's a really long sequence and in order for me to study it, I can't do it by hand. I need to use computer programming in order to go through this code that's 3 billion letters long in order to figure out how your DNA code is associated with disease. My interests are actually right at the interface between biology and computer science. There's a huge database that contains all known organisms, so humans, monkeys, mice, viruses, bacteria. Usually now, if a doctor is worried about you having an infection, based on your age and where your symptoms are, if it's in your ear or your heart or your brain, they try to make a best guess as to what type of infection you have. And then they'll send off tests specific for those bugs. So if they think you have strep throat, they send off the strep test. But the type of testing we do, since we can essentially test for any type of infection with a single test, so we don't have to have a bias going into the testing saying we think it's x, y, or z, we just say let's see what's in there. A cottage girl of teenager now says he's taking life one day at a time after being critically ill from a mysterious illness. New stories Mary Jolla has his story and details into new DNA sequence that helps solve a medical mystery. It's spring and like any other teenager, Joshua Osborne can't be stuck indoors. I feel wonderful to have this 80 degrees. It's a welcome change from last summer here in the hospital and in a coma. His symptoms began last April with fevers and headaches and he only got worse. And he needed to be hospitalized. Josh may not remember the hospital's stay, but his dad Clark does. They tested for everything they knew. They tested for viruses and bacteria and you know, ultimately he had a brain scan and two or three spinal tabs. Yeah, but he had like all these crazy tubes. Like I remember that weekend when they were doing it, it was so intense it was like he was going to die like that week. We got Josh's samples from his doctor because his doctor was giving up. They had no idea. They sunk millions of dollars into this kid. They have you, I mean hundreds of tests, hundreds, right? Sent to the CDC, send it to multiple labs and they couldn't get an answer back. And they, I mean, so much money, right? And so they turned to us and they were like, we need to know what it is. So this is where we have the gene sequencer. We got a small amount of Josh's cerebral spinal fluid, which is the fluid that bathes the brain. With very powerful computer algorithms, we took out all the human sequences that were present in the data and then searched all the non-human sequences that we got against a giant database that contains gene sequences of all known organisms. And very quickly, we saw that the sequences were all for a particular organism that Josh likely contracted when he visited Puerto Rico about nine months before. And fortunately, that organism, it's a bacterium and there's a very straightforward treatment for it, penicillin. The doctor gave him the drugs, you know, that same day and he was fine like 24 hours later. Well, I can tell you that I'm happy to be alive and that I have dreams and I'm looking forward to accomplishing them. Data analysis is changing all medicine. It's not just changing how diseases are diagnosed. Data is changing how we discover cures to diseases. And even after a cure is known, data is used for delivering medicine to patients. For example, to fight polio in Africa by distributing vaccines to everybody who needs it. The magic of polio is finding all the kids and getting them to have the vaccine three times. And so we're taking satellite photographs and using visual analysis to figure out what the population is. And so we can look and see if we're giving out a certain amount of vaccine or we really reaching all the kids. And amazingly, what we found is that on the boundaries between political areas, there's various settlements that one group thought what the other group was taking care of. We also can take the phone now that has the GPS tracking. And when they come back at the end of the day, plug it in and see what they've been every minute. And that's making all the difference because just getting coverage up from 80% of the kids and 90% of the kids, that's the difference between success and failure. And literally the software that lets us look at the movements of the teams, looks at the satellite maps, gathers all the statistics together and tracks this thing. That's what's going to make this the second disease we can never get rid of. So the systems thinking and the magic of software are really at the center.