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?"

Neat

[whereiswaldo]

That's neat. If you charge for a service, people line up for it.
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..

[JJAnon]

Like the article says, there are no real practical uses for this. All that you get out of it is a long sequence of ATGCs which are pretty useless. I say useless because genes only show a predisposition towards certain diseases, but do not guarantee actually GETTING the disease. A complete health checkup would probably accomplish the same, at a drastically lower cost.

Discoveries?

[Galahad2]

What happens if this guy finds the cure for cancer in your DNA? Is it your property? Same goes for lesser things, like a really good example of a gene. Is furthering the scientific community not optional?

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

[bongholio]

Now we just need Sim Human... Load up your genome, make a few mutations, splice in some celbrity sequences, hit go, see how you woulda turned out.

Money is no object

[tmark]

I just can't believe how amazed people here are that someone would charge $621K or whatever to have their genome mapped. This is something that had not even been done for any human barely 2 years ago, and then only at the HUGE expense to governments all over the world, and now you can get it done for less than a million dollars ? Do these people realize how immense is the enterprise they can buy now, for less than a lot of houses that dot-commers were buying in the Bay area that same 2 years ago ?

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

[bmetzler]

Are these millionaires naive enough to think that a copy of their data will not be kept somewhere?

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.

-Brent

This highlights a huge conflict coming

[MichaelPenne]

in the the 21st century.

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?

[geoffeg]

How big would the resulting data be? In the meg's, gig's? Would it compress well?

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?

[mbessey]

Let's see. Three billion base pairs, at approximately two bits of information per base pair = 6 billion bits, or about 750 Megabytes of raw data.

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

[mbessey]

We're only talking about 6 billion bits or so. You'd need about 2 CD's, if you didn't compress it at all.

-Mark

A nice comparison

[tfoss]

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?

[Rich0]

This is a fascinating topic in itself - what does the DNA which doesn't code for protein do? The majority of your DNA doesn't actually code for protein.

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...