Purchase Your Personal Gene Map 298
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?"
Neat (Score:3, Interesting)
If the government mandated that you had to let them figure out your genome, people would scream.
Are these millionaires naive enough to think that a copy of their data will not be kept somewhere?
Interesting, but.. (Score:1, Interesting)
Discoveries? (Score:5, Interesting)
And the same question goes for if someone gets your DNA from a hair you dropped, and makes some discovery through that. What rights do you have over your own genetic makeup?
Sim Human (Score:4, Interesting)
Money is no object (Score:5, Interesting)
And many of these are the same people who probably ooh-and-ahh at anime cels costing tens of thousands of dollars, or who dream of plans spending tens of thousands of dollars wiring their house with the latest optical-this and wireless-that.
People have spent far more money in far sillier ways.
Re:Neat (Score:5, Interesting)
What difference does it make whether their data is kept somewhere or not? More to the point, wouldn't they want a copy of their dns on file somewhere?
Imagine if I had a medical emergency. I'm going to die. Someone needs to make a life or death decision fast. It could save me or kill me. What to do, what to do, what to do? But if I had my DNA on file somewhere, just look it up, and the decision is made.
I think that it should be mandatory for everyone to have their DNA on file. Imagine the benefit it would provide for not only medical emergencies, but even criminal investigations, and other things.
-BrentThis highlights a huge conflict coming (Score:2, Interesting)
We'll experience a revolution in biotechnology and it's ability to give folks longer, healthier lives.
But many or the treatments will be very expensive.
At what point does being denied a cure for a disease due to poverty equal being denied the right to life?
Or do we just accept that the rich will live years, maybe decades, longer than the rest of US?
How big is my source? (Score:3, Interesting)
It would be cool to be able to carry around your own genome on a little CDROM in your wallet or purse.
Geoffeg
Re:How big is my source? (Score:4, Interesting)
It'll probably compress very well, since most of the sequences correspond with either Amino Acids or control codes of one sort or another.
Probably smaller than the source code to your favorite Linux distribution, overall...
-Mark
It's really not much data at all (Score:3, Interesting)
-Mark
A nice comparison (Score:2, Interesting)
I was at a lecture given by Leslie Orgel (a very famous biochemist known for work on the molecular origin of life) and he made a very nice point when asked about the genome project. He likened the sequencing of it to deciphering the white pages of a phone book for a large city. If we ever work out the proteome (the collection of proteins that the genome codes for, along with post-translational modifications, binding partners, etc...which is much beyond what is specified in the genome), then we will have the equivalent of the yellow pages. Yet, even with both of these references, you could only begin to try and understand how the city (and by comparison, the cell) functions.
So while having your personal genome might be cool in the uber-rich kind of way, the usefulness is still quite limited.
-Ted
Re:Why so expensive? (Score:2, Interesting)
I am not sure what this new service is going to sequence - the articles suggest it is the whole shebang, but it could just be the expressed portion. If you start with mRNA instead of DNA when making up the clones that are sequenced, you end up just sequencing the coding portion of the genome - which is a LOT less work (again, by far most of your DNA does not code for protein). The actual Human Genome Project and the Celera effort sequenced the whole thing.
We already know that some sequences of DNA are regulatory in nature - they are sequences that proteins bind to to increase to decrease the rate of gene expression. There are also sequences the DNA replication machinery bind to when copying the DNA. There are highly repetitve sequences which have more topological purposes - such as telomores and centromeres. (The method used to copy DNA cannot copy the very end of a strand, so your chromosomes have regions at the end called telomeres which are repetitive so that nothing "important" is ever near the end of a strand. Centromeres are the region at the center of a chromosome where two halves of an X-shaped replicated chromosome meet).
I'm personally curious as to how all this "junk" DNA fits into DNA topology. Your DNA isn't just a big long line - it looks more like a tangled phone cord. The most tightly tanged portions are inaccessible by the machinery of the cell that expresses DNA - so it is essentially shut off. I wouldn't be surprised if the sequence coposition of DNA on a large scale influences the overall topology of a chromosome. Bottom line is that we are nowhere close to solving some of the most interesting questions of genetics.
I wonder when the day will come that you can compile source into a genome just like you compile into machine language today. Imagine having a glibbacteria.so to reference which does all your organism housekeeping functions. You would just write some code to make an organism do something useful, make a statically-linked executable, and then input it into a as-yet-hypothetical large DNA synthesizer. Insert into cell and you have a new organism...