X Prize Foundation Encourages DNA Decoding 100
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "The X Prize Foundation, the group behind the $10 million prize for human space flight, 'plans to offer a $5 million to $20 million prize to the first team that completely decodes the DNA of 100 or more people in a matter of weeks, according to foundation officials and others involved,' the Wall Street Journal reports. 'Such speedy gene sequencing would represent a technology breakthrough for medical research. It could launch an era of "personal" genomics in which ordinary people can learn their complete DNA code for less than the cost of a wide-screen television.' But don't set aside that TV purchase just yet: Foundation officials don't expect the prize money to be claimed for five to 10 years."
Costs? (Score:3, Interesting)
Thanks!
Re:don't be so paranoid. (Score:4, Interesting)
Have you tried google?
If You Smoke, You're Fired [thewbalchannel.com]
and
Bad habit is under fire from Daniels, U.S. firms [indystar.com]
From the article:
Ohio is one of 21 states that allow companies to fire workers who smoke anywhere -- even at home.
You call me paranoid, but I bet that if, 10 years ago, I'd suggested that people would be fired for smoking in their own homes and on their own free time you would have called that paranoid too.
Re:A whole new era of tire-kicking. (Score:4, Interesting)
This kind of genome sequencing technology would bring it into the foreground so that the whole American population would suddenly talk about and understand the concept, and perhaps do something about it, in the same way that high interest rates in the early 1980s had everyone suddenly talking about "time value of money" and "cap rates", terms previously only used and understood by economists and MBAs. (Of course, people seem to have forgotten these things since.)
I mention this because America currently practices a kind of strategy against adverse selection in health care by linking health care provisioning to employment through employer-provided health insurance. I'm not sure if this is why the system was set up initially (probably not, as economists didn't have a good theory regarding adverse selection until the 1970s) but the idea here is that if you're healthy enough to be employable, then you're probably healthy enough to be worth insuring from the perspective of the insurance companies. By being employed, you help level the information assymetry that you hold in your advantage over the insurers.
Of course, if everyone (insurers and would-be subscribers to insurance) held perfect knowledge, the whole industry would collapse. Insurers wouldn't bother insuring people who needed it, and the people who were super-healthy wouldn't bother buying insurance.
Other countries (e.g. Canada) solve this problem by making health care universal. It's quite egalitarian, which some people would consider a good thing. It's also very efficient, because now you don't have to put all kinds of resources into a system to check to see if people are good candidates for insurance. (You also don't have to have billing departments or big beefy accounting departments.)
If there's any kind of sanity in the US, this kind of technology will (finally) provide the political impetus for a real, substantial universal health care system there, too. Whether or not such a system develops can be used as a proxy to determine the hidden (or at least unobservable) information regarding the presense of sanity in the US.
Cheers,
Richard
Re:Chances are these are moot points (Score:2, Interesting)
There are only a few successes of gene therapy. Getting the minute details of human physiology is hard. The results from mouse metabolism studies do not always carry over to humans. Researchers are make some progress on understanding the basis of obesity (i.e., leptin, ghrelin, etc.) that lies beyond the obvious "overeating makes you fat". Stay tuned.
Here's you sequence. And it's all been copyrighted (Score:3, Interesting)