Purchase Your Personal Gene Map

dstone writes "Craig Venter, Time Magazine's Person of the Year in 2000 has a new hobby: collecting rich people's DNA. Millionaires are lining up to buy their personal gene maps for the cool price of USD$621,500. The process takes a week and you get some insight into your genetic mutations that may correlate with illnesses, cancers, Alzeimer's, etc. Venter is a high profile character in the genetic sequencing scene and the Human Genome Project. More info on him may be found here(1) , here(2), and here(3) . If you had the pocket change, would you give this man your business?"

Re:Well.

[RaboKrabekian]

choosing to abort is possible, but Gattica like changes are not... at least as of yet.

You make a good point, but I just want to clarify something. If I remember correctly, they weren't changing anything in Gattaca. The process described worked by choosing the best of among many embryos - resulting in once in a lifetime "super babies" every time.

The process of reading a gene map became so easy that the world descriminated heavily against people with any possible or probably defects, even if they hadn't manifested themselves.

That's why this news is kind of frightening.

Re:Why so expensive?

[Rich0]

I haven't been staying current in the field, but sequencing 4 billion bases of DNA is a LOT! Those costs are not really outrageous when you break them down.

A typical sequencing reaction is good for about 600 bases (well, that actually is a high-end number - but I think Celera has figured things out well enough to make that regularly). Figure you have to sequence at least 12 billion bases since you have to have some overlap on all the fragments in order to assemble them into a singe genome - 3x overcoverage is a very generous estimage. So 12E9 / 600 = 2E7 reactions. Assume you can do one in two hours (which is probably a bit fast) - that means time for 84 reactions in series in one week (not counting the time it takes to assemble it all - corellating all those sequences takes a LOT of CPU). So - 2E7/84 = 238,095 reactions running in parallel at all times. A $100k sequencer can do about 64 at once.

I am a biochemist - but I've been out of the field for about three years. So those are ballpark estimates based on where things were going back then. As I see it - they would need to commit $372M in capital to get an earnings of $650k per week - a 9% return on capital, and I didn't even figure in the cost of the reagents and all the robotics it takes to prep the samples, let alone the janitor that sweeps the floors at night. Now, if there has been a 10-100x increase in sequencing throughput in the last year or two I could believe that this is feasible, but it seems a bit far-fetched. Definitely a Craig Ventner idea...

Then again, that people are even talking about this is very amazing. Keep in mind that only a few years ago they were expecting that the Human Genome still would be undone today - they've been working on it since the '80s. Craig came in and said he'd beat the NIH to the punch by a few years - they changed their methods to come in at a close tie. Now we're talking about being able to do the whole thing in a week. A few years ago the first bacteria was sequenced at less than 1 million bases - and that was BIG news - it took years of work if I recall correctly. At the peak of the Human Genome race Celera was doing one of those each day and then some - mostly because of an ENORMOUS investment of capital as well as a few technology advances.

This makes me wonder if they will make the customers sign a release to giving Ventner access to statistical data within their genome. One question the completed Human Genome did not answer is how genes vary from person to person - and the only way to answer that question is to sequence lots of genomes. If Ventner can get others to pay for the work and then patent the results that would certainly be a good business move.

Re:Why so expensive?

[Anonymous Coward]

The article mentions a critical point:

...scientists know the genetic abnormalities associated with only a few dozen diseases, but it pointed out thousands more were expected to be discovered in the coming decades...

This is key. Ignoring all junk DNA, the extreme majority of our genomes is identical. Most of the differences are just occasional single base changes ("single nucleotide polymorphism" = SNP). Most of these SNPs code for nondisease traits like hair color.

Finding disease SNPs is a *huge* job and has only really begun. It requires lots of hands-on science and genetics research; it's not a press GO and wait for an answer problem.

The other critical factoid is that sequencing a genome will get cheaper over time. So, today a foolish rich person can spend a lot of money and know their genome, but do little with the data. Or, a smart person can wait five years, sequence their genome more cheaply, and understand much more.

"A close tie"

[anomalousman]

Actually, the constant media harassment was irritating them, so the two parallel (public/private) projects declared the gene to be sequenced BEFORE either project was complete.

The enormous media frenzy that happened as a result took up some extra time, but enabled them to get back to the science in peace - with extra funding in several cases.

Re:Discoveries?

[Dthoma]

"And what happens if someone takes a nude picture of your sister without her permission and makes a million from it? Does he own the pictures and the money? What rights does your sister have?"

AFAIK, in Britain, the photographer owns the photos and can do whatever they like with them as long as it's not libellous.

Re:Well.

[Detritus]

Eugenics was a popular political/social movement in the United States before World War II. Margaret Sanger, one of the founders of Planned Parenthood, was an advocate for eugenics. The movement never recovered from the backlash caused by the atrocities committed in Nazi Germany.