Graphs Show Costs of DNA Sequencing Falling Fast 126
kkleiner writes "You may know that the cost to sequence a human genome is dropping, but you probably have no idea how fast that price is coming down. The National Human Genome Research Institute, part of the US National Institute of Health, has compiled extensive data on the costs of sequencing DNA over the past decade and used that information to create two truly jaw-dropping graphs. NHGRI's research shows that not only are sequencing costs plummeting, they are outstripping the exponential curves of Moore's Law. By a big margin."
Great! (Score:3)
How about the cost of analysis of said genomes?
Re:Great! (Score:4, Insightful)
Sequencing has been where the focus on cost has been going. It doesn't make much sense to try and reduce the cost of analysis when it takes a very long time and a huge amount of money to accomplish. The graph was hard to read, but at this point with the cost well over $10k there's a lot more that has to be done before analysis is worth spending a lot of time economizing.
But as it gets cheaper more and more of the focus will be on the analysis side. And the cost of analysis will come down, given that insurance isn't going to cover the sequencing at this point, analysis is moot in most cases. As more research analyzes sequenced DNA I'm sure tricks and such will be discovered to bring the cost down. But right now you're dealing with low volumes and as such cost is higher than it will be with higher volumes.
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Define "cost of analysis". I paid 23andme.com $100 per person (myself, my wife, and my brother) to sequence 1 million SNPs per person using Illumina's V3 chip (plus $5/month/person for as long as we have accounts with them) and to provide current and future research data with regards to those SNPs. That is *super cheap* for the kind of data I'm getting out of it (I'd be happy to post an imgr link with an anonymized print-version of the report, although I guess it doesn't matter since I've already uploaded t
Re:Great! (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, they're not sequencing.
They're checking.
The way 23andme and most personal genome companies work is that they have those genochips (Illumina) with one million DNA sequences on them, and they check whether or not your DN has one of those sequences.
If you have a SNP not on the chip (well, you have lots of SNP not on the chip), it won't list anything. If, at a given chromosome locale, they have "all" of the "known" SNP, but you happen to have a mutant variant not on their lib, then you're not detected.
"Sequencing" involves taking your DNA, and getting every sequence, no matter what. And that's still long and very expensive. We're in the era of the "thousand genomes", meaning we expect in a couple year to complete a thousand full sequences. Of course, 10 years later, we'll sequence everyone, but, so far, it's still a way out.
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Progress in SNP chips, though they were a big breakthrough when introduced and remain very important in research, has been pretty static compared to the dramatic speed with which 'next generation' sequencing technologies have brought down the cost and increased the amount of data we have to cope with. Whole genome sequencing is on an entirely different scale - 3 billion bases rather than a million. Even an 'exome' (the sequence of all the actual genes in your genome) runs to about 40 million bases.
Costs Falling Fast? (Score:2, Interesting)
That's monetary cost - not social and personal. ;-)
Soon the $ cost will be free - and mandatory. If you want to fly, or even drive a car.
Hey! And to think, they said it couldn't happen here!
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Yet new computer ha
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"How about the cost of analysis of said genomes?"
It's computationally expensive and pretty much subject to Moore's Law (though improved algorithms like Burrows-Wheeler alignment have helped to speed things up in the last couple of years). So it's getting cheaper, but not fast enough to keep up with the expected deluge of data. If you're just interested in sequencing a fixed number of genomes you benefit from both cheaper/faster sequencing and cheaper/faster processing power. But if you're a major genome cen
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If it's not a secret, which center uses Burrows-Wheeler alignments for annotations? All of annotation pipelines I know are based on granola BLAST.
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Not for annotation, but for the initial alignment of NGS reads to the reference genome. BWA, Bowtie, and SOAP2 all use the Burrows-Wheeler transform, and are in common use. For variant calling and functional annotation we'd use other tools, e.g.:
http://www.broadinstitute.org/gsa/wiki/index.php/Best_Practice_Variant_Detection_with_the_GATK_v2 [broadinstitute.org]
http://www.openbioinformatics.org/annovar/ [openbioinformatics.org]
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Full annotation takes about half an hour for a bacterial genome of 4Mbases on 100 processors.
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In addition to my previous comment. Assuming cost of processor per year = $2000 per pi*10^7s, 100 proc per 1.8x10^3s = 1.8x10^6s = $100, that's only hardware cost.
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oopps , $10.
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That knowledge doesn't help the patient.
If there was no difference in treatment or health outcome for people who have a known inclination for disease or disorder, then you'd be right. You aren't.
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in the absence of genetic sequencing you'd never know they have marfan syndrome.
If they're not showing symptoms, how will this help in the treatment of the patient?
GP pointed out that they have heart problems even with no obvious symptoms. From the wiki page on marfan syndrome
During pregnancy, even in the absence of preconceived cardiovascular abnormality, women with Marfan syndrome are at significant risk of aortic dissection, which is often fatal even when rapidly treated. For this reason, women with Marfan syndrome should receive a thorough assessment prior to conception, and echocardiography should be performed every six to ten weeks during pregnancy, to assess the aortic root diameter.
So if you have Marfan with no symptoms and get pregnant, you could die suddenly. If you know you have Marfan, you can make an informed decision and maybe chose not to get pregnant and risk it.
With all the hundreds of genetic conditions out there, it's a gross generalization to say "If you have sympoms, you don't need sequencing and if you don't have symptoms, you don't need any treatment."
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Now if only the doctors get on the bandwagon and start diagnosing people based on an individuals genome.
Sorry, that'll take 10+ years of basic research, 10+ years of clinical trials to provide practical applications for findings of said research, plus another 10+ years for a new generation of doctors to matriculate with knowledge of said applications. More likely, big pharma will be "farming" human genome data for drugs with rapid development platforms [wikipedia.org]. The scary part here is that, without basic research, more unintended consequences are to be expected...
Harry Potter explanation (Score:3)
You need to find ends from one strip that match the beginning of another strip.
This means that with some patience you could flip through all
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Compared to the $100 million it cost 10 years ago? Yeah, $12K is cheap. Not to *you*, but for research its direct cheap.
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While $12,000 is quite a bit of money, it's certainly much lower than the July 2001 cost of $100,000,000. Also, my understanding is that most uses don't require sequencing the entire genome, but rather just a small subset of it. The cost per megabase has dropped from nearly $10,000 to less than $0.20, which does seem quite cheap.
Re:Still north of $12,000 (Score:5, Informative)
'Also, my understanding is that most uses don't require sequencing the entire genome, but rather just a small subset of it.'
Very small subsets (e.g. individual genes) are still done the 'traditional' way (1990s technology!). Intermediate subsets (like the 'exome') are now done using a pre-selection 'capture' process ('target enrichment') followed by analysis on the same 'next generation' instruments that are used for whole genomes. Right now, this makes sense economically, since it requires less capacity (fewer consumables and less run time) on the expensive sequencers. But as sequencing prices continue to drop, we'll probably reach a point where it's cheaper to do the whole genome than any significant subset (since the 'capture' process is also fairly expensive). Cheaper to do the wet lab stuff, anyway - whole genomes also require much more processing power than useful subsets like exomes.
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Being a logarithmic graph, every tick in this range on the graph is $10,000, so the final number looks like it's over $20k right now...
Re:Still north of $12,000. (No, that's $30,000) (Score:3)
The graphs seem to indicate that the cost is still north of $12,000 which isn't exactly cheap.
Dude, you are reading the graph incorrectly. Look carefully at the (logarithmic) scale: the cost is actually around $30,000 !! (No, those are not factorial signs, I am just expressing my shock by the 30 thousand figure.)
Yes, I know, that actually supports your point even more strongly: while the cost was reduced dramatically from $100 million, it seems to be leveling at a cost that is still way too high for many practical applications in the clinical field outside of research.
DIY? (Score:2)
Question for the bio-folks: is there a way for someone (okay, me) to DIY this? I'm curious to know my own genome, but I'm *very* leery of having that data living in some company's database. What I'd like to be able to do is have the data, and be able to look up how any discoveries later on map to what I've got. Is that possible? What I don't want is what seems to be the prevalent pattern right now of companies telling customers: "You have indicators for x & y. Re-do this & pay us again in a few year
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Even in research, most of the sequencing at whole genome level is outsourced to big companies (like, for example, Complete Genomics) since investing in the capabilities, machinery and computer power to sequence whole genomes is simply too big for sequencing one or a few individual genomes (you currently need to invest a few millions to get started with the sequencing of whole genomes). You can DIY sequencing of small fragments (for example, to determine whether a known genetic cause of a hereditary disease
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If you could get your hands on a V3 chip from Illumina (the same used by 23andme.com) you could do it, although you could always pay 23andme.com the $200 for the sequencing, download the raw data, and delete your account.
I myself paid for 23andme.com to do genetic profiles for myself, my wife, and my brother. $100/person and then $5/month/person ongoing as they add more research each month (come on, $5? Cheap! for the research data they add, although I guess some people don't see the value).
23andme does not sequence your DNA (Score:3)
https://www.23andme.com/you/faqwin/sequencing/ [23andme.com]
my emphasis:
What is the difference between genotyping and sequencing?
Though you may hear both terms in reference to obtaining information about DNA, genotyping and sequencing refer to slightly different things.
Genotyping is the process of determining which genetic variants an individual possesses. Genotyping can be performed through a variety of different methods, depending on the variants of interest and resources available. At 23andMe, we look at SNPs, and a good way of looking at many SNPs in a single individual is a recently developed technology called a “DNA chip.”
Sequencing is a method used to determine the exact sequence of a certain length of DNA. Depending on the location, a given stretch may include some DNA that varies between individuals, like SNPs, in addition to regions that are constant. So sequencing is one way to genotype someone, but not the only way.
You might wonder, then, why we don't just sequence everyone's entire genome, and find every single genetic variant they possess. Unfortunately, sequencing technology has not yet progressed to the point where it is feasible to sequence an entire genome quickly and cheaply. It took the Human Genome Project over 10 years' work by multiple labs to sequence the three billion base pair genomes of just a few individuals. For now, genotyping technologies such as those used by 23andMe provide an efficient and cost-effective way of obtaining more than enough genetic information for scientists—and you—to study. Copyright © 2007-2011 23andMe, Inc. All rights reserved.
To be sure you have gained interesting information for your $200, but you have neither your sequence, nor a complete list of differences from a reference human sequence, which of course if you did would give you your sequence.
23andme only gives you a list of many SNPs.
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'What I'd like to be able to do is have the data, and be able to look up how any discoveries later on map to what I've got. Is that possible?'
You can't do genome sequencing, or even SNP chip genotyping, in a DIY lab, so you'll have to involve a large company or research centre at some point. But you can do this anonymously (e.g. through a physician) and get hold of the raw data afterwards to analyse as you please, assuming you have the technical knowledge to make sense of it. Illumina is one company that pr
The Question Needs To Be Clarified (Score:2)
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Question for the bio-folks: is there a way for someone (okay, me) to DIY this?
Wait ten years and then buy ten year old sequencers from todays companies.
(I'm not being a sarcastic dick. A number of DIY bio-hackers/Makers have "cheaply" stocked their sheds/basements with high-end analysis and synthesis equipment by buying the stuff that mainstream biotech labs have moved away from. When a field is progressing as quickly as biotech, once equipment is one generation out of date, it's completely out of date.)
So can we all chip in (Score:2)
1 cent apiece to find out why CowboyNeal is the way CowboyNeal is?
Moore's law is too slow (Score:4, Interesting)
We've been observing this decrease over the last few years at our sequencing lab too. Some people might find it fascinating, but I, as a bioinformatician, find it frightening.
We're still keeping up at maintaining and analysing our sequenced reads and genomes at work, but the amount of incoming sequencing data (currently a few terabytes of data per month) is increasing four-to-five-fold per year (compared to doubling each 18-24 months in Moore's law). Our lab had the first human genomes at the end of 2009 after waiting for almost 9 years since the world's first human genome, now we're getting a few genomes per month. We're not too far away of running out of installing sufficient processing power (following Moore's law) and no longer being able to process all of this data.
So yes, the more-than-exponential decrease in sequencing costs is cool and offers a lot of possibilities in getting to know your own genome, advances in personalized medicine, and possibilities for population-wide genome sequencing research, but there's no way we'll be able to process all of this interesting data because Moore's law is simply way too slow as compared to advances in biochemical technologies.
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I assume you're talking about incoming data, not the final DNA sequence. As I understand it the final result is 2 bits/base pair and about 3 billion base pairs so about a CD's worth of data per human. And if you were talking about a genetic database I guess 99%+ is common so you could just store a "reference human" and diffs against that. So at 750 MB for the first person and 7.5 MB for each additional person I guess you could store 2-300.000 full genetic profiles on a 2 TB disk. Probably the whole human ra
Re:Moore's law is too slow (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, the incoming (and intermediate) data sets are huge. You don't just sequence each base once, but 30-50 times over on average (required to call variants accurately). And you don't want to throw this data away, since analysis algorithms are improving all the time. But it's true that the final 'diff' to the reference sequence is very small, and has been compressed to as little as 4Mb in one publication:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18996942 [nih.gov]
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I assume you're talking about incoming data, not the final DNA sequence. As I understand it the final result is 2 bits/base pair and about 3 billion base pairs so about a CD's worth of data per human. And if you were talking about a genetic database I guess 99%+ is common so you could just store a "reference human" and diffs against that. So at 750 MB for the first person and 7.5 MB for each additional person I guess you could store 2-300.000 full genetic profiles on a 2 TB disk. Probably the whole human race in less than 100 TB.
The incoming data is image-based, so yes, it will be huge. Regarding the sequence data: yes; in its most condensed format it could be stored in 750MB. There are a couple of issues that you're overlooking, however:
1. The reads aren't uniform quality -- and methods of analysis that don't consider the quality score of a read are quickly being viewed as antiquated. So each two bit "call" also has a few more bits representing the confidence in that call.
2. This technology is based on redundant reads. In order
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'The incoming data is image-based, so yes, it will be huge.'
The image data is routinely discarded by at least some major centres; the raw sequence and quality data alone is huge enough to be a major issue! See:
http://www.bio-itworld.com/news/09/16/10/Broad-approach-genome-sequencing-partI.html [bio-itworld.com]
'It's been a couple of years since we saved the primary [raw image] data. It is cheaper to redo the sequence and pull it out of the freezer. There are 5,000 tubes in a freezer. Storing a tube isn't very expensive. Stor
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If you need the raw data again, you can just resequence the sample.
The only problem with this approach, of course, is that samples are consumable; eventually there wouldn't be any more material left to
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'If you need the raw data again, you can just resequence the sample.'
See my reply above to another post - this is exactly the approach that some centres are taking. But as you say, some samples can't be regarded as a consumable resource (e.g. archival clinical material is often only available in limiting quantities).
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Indeed, as a developer/sysadmin in a bioinformatics lab, I find this equally terrifying.
As of two years ago when my supervisor went to a meeting at Sanger (one of the largest sequencing centres in the world for those reading this, the granddaddies of large scale sequencing) they said a few frightening things. First, they were spending more on power and other items related to data storage than chemical supplies for sequencing. Second, the cost of resequencing something compared to storing the sequenced dat
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Do not forget storage problems. The center I know already is dropping annotations closer than a substrain. Given recent setbacks in budgeting American national centers (raw sequence data storage project being dropped in one of them), the problem will only get bigger.
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And yet tens of if not hundreds of millions of handheld supercomputers are being sent out yearly. The processing power/storage capacity exists to do this stuff, we just need to make and encourage the use of p2p computing apps boinc style on all platforms, and solve the various energy related problems keeping people from turning their com
What happened in... (Score:3)
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...Oct 2007?
FTFA: "From 2001 to 2007, first generation techniques (dideoxy chain termination or ‘Sanger’ sequencing) for sequencing DNA were already following an exponential curve. Starting around January of 2008, however, things go nuts. That’s the time when, according to the NHGRI, a significant part of production switched to second generation techniques [wikipedia.org]."
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In 2008 454 LifeSciences released the Genome Sequencer FLX, which was the first affordable next-generation sequencer to become widely available, Since then a number of other high-throughput sequencers have been released (including Illumina and SOLiD). This marks the beginning of 2nd generation sequencing era, prior to this, the method used was Sanger-based sequencing, and although this is completely automated nowadays, it is still based on principles that were established in the 1970's, which are comparativ
Deja vu all over again... (Score:2)
I saw the same thing back in the mid-1990s.
Sequencing technology was ramping up hyper-exponentially.
That means that it curves up on semi-log paper.
It was outstripping Moore's Law, and crushing our data systems.
Finished DNA sequence only needs 2 bits/base pair,
but the raw data behind those 2 bits can be much bigger;
in our case, the raw data was scanned images of radiograms.
In the early '90s, a typical sequencing project was a few hundred DNA fragments.
Each fragment is a few hundred base pairs.
You put each f
Re:Deja vu all over again... (Score:4, Informative)
'Of course, that may just be the plateau before it falls off the next cliff.'
The next cliff is already emerging through the mist, e.g.:
http://www.genomeweb.com/sequencing/life-tech-outlines-single-molecule-sequencing-long-pieces-dna [genomeweb.com]
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/01/guest-post-introduction-to-nanopore-sequencing/ [wired.com]
It's not clear which 'single-molecule' technology will eventually win out, but it will almost certainly have the word 'nano' in it somewhere.
Raw data (Score:2)
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And how much money that government spent was wasted and never produced anything at all? You are assuming that government grants are a good thing, while forgetting that this is the money that was taken out of the economy by taxing the private sector (direct taxes or borrowing, which is deferred taxes + interest, or just money printing, which is taxing the entire net-worth via inflation).
How much money was wasted by government? How many projects have failed?
All of the wasted money, and even the money that fin
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In private sector you have to make sure that what you do is not going to be all waste, that it will provide some return.
Yes, and it needs to provide some return in a relatively short amount of time. Almost all research done by private companies is aimed at product development; only a handful of corporations have enough resources (i.e. spare cash) to fund undirected basic research. Non-commercial basic research, regardless of funding source, has no such constraints, and can afford to take a much longer-ter
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Some understanding of history is useful here
- INDEED.
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Government funding provides the degree of stability necessary to complete huge, perhaps decades-long, projects. Also besides things that get classified state secrets and such, the raw data and details regarding processes become publicly available, decreasing the need to reinvent the wheel... and therefore waste. Finally, money gets spent on projects that may not have any immediately obvious benefit to Joe Sizpack, but increase humanity's understanding of the world around them. So research is actually one of
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I disagree fundamentally that there should be such ridiculous things as huge, decade long projects. Who the hell do you want to trust some ridiculous projects like that: people with no accountability and no reason to bother cutting costs because their bottom line will be affected? Why? Why would I ever want to fund something like that with my money? I will not. I will find every possible way to avoid funding it. It's ridiculous.
Besides, when you say something is 'guaranteed' because it's done by government.
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All of the technological improvements - the very technologies that were created- were funded by the government in the form of NHGRI and DOE grants. Also, the entire next generation is being funded directly from the government. While the commercialization of these have been commercially funded. And to note the technologies developed to date are to resequence human genomes, which is the same thing as denovo sequencing. The costs have come down, as has the utility of the sequence.
That's all well and good, but we don't have a "control world" where the government didn't interfere and people created technological improvements themselves, at a different pace. My belief is that it would be a more rapid pace, but since we don't have this control world we will never know if the government helped or hindered progress.
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Tulips.
Your arguments are invalid.
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Tulips? That's your entire argument? Yeah, I see how my argument is invalid because some European governments in 16 hundreds were DEBASING their currencies by replacing replacing monetary metals in them with common non monetary metals.
You are invalid.
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I would say that the current state of healthcare in the U.S. proves conclusively that "the market" isn't universally effective. Our system of private healthcare has the highest cost per patient of any in the world and slightly poorer outcome than countries with socialized medicine.
Another problem with a pure market approach is rather intrinsic. Markets always settle to a state where there is some segment of the population that is priced out. We have no good way to make a market not have that tail. When the
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Our system of private healthcare has the highest cost per patient of any in the world and slightly poorer outcome than countries with socialized medicine.
It isn't even a binary choice between private healthcare and socialized medicine, of course. The other first-world nations generally have superior outcomes regardless of the exact type - many with have private hospitals and private insurance - but they all have more heavily regulated health insurance markets, and some degree of subsidies. This too is ana
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I suspect that by far the greatest danger is the patent trolls coming out of the woodwork the moment anything useful comes out of it Some of the patents in that area are truly absurd. I don't see how anyone can own the idea of me knowing something specific about the makeup of my own body and taking appropriate actions to optimize my health based on that knowledge, but that's what some of the patents amount to.
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If you bothered to go to the link I provided to a different thread in the top comment, you would have seen that I am giving information there, that shows that private sector was the preferred solution for buying both health insurance and
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The fatal flaw to your arguments in the other thread is that medical care was mostly cheap in 1920 because there wasn't a hell of a lot they could do. It was effectively all elective. Your chances were nearly as good if you stayed at home with traditional remedies. That kept the lid on prices. Once medical care became significantly better than no medical care the balance shifted.
My argument has the advantage that I can point to actual figures from the U.S., Canada, U.K, and other places. Yours is based on a
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The fatal flaw to your arguments in the other thread is that medical care was mostly cheap in 1920 because there wasn't a hell of a lot they could do. It was effectively all elective. Your chances were nearly as good if you stayed at home with traditional remedies.
- wrong [wikipedia.org]. Doctors in many places, including the one in the link, have improved the outcomes for patients significantly over the 19th century by using scientific approach. The innovations came in various forms, from sharing medical cases data to find better treatments, to using ethers, cocaine and other opioids for anesthesia [wikipedia.org], to understanding what role simple procedures, such as washing hands and sterilization of instruments have on medical outcomes.
The very story we are in here, is displaying the fatal fl
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Medicare/Medicaid/CHIP, all this was created because there were 10-15% of people who didn't have insurance then. Now 33% can't afford insurance. This is government at work.
And there's the summary. You advocate simply turning the clock back and just letting those 10-15% die apparently (not to mention the HUGE assumption that we CAN turn the clock back, a lot more than just subsidized insurance has happened in half a century). I advocate picking one of several actual systems that are up and running right now that provide 100% coverage.
As with many things, it's not intervention that causes the problem, it's the misguided attempt to minimize intervention more than it actually can
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If you actually followed the provided link, you would have seen the data, government collected and university research data, which supports the claim that private enterprise was doing a better job at providing health insurance and health care than any government entity was.
I find it abhorrent to trust anything at all to the government, especially anything that deals with money, regulations of business, taxes, any sort of health care.
The only purpose for a federal government is common military defense and a
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Did you again not pay attention to the data?
the market for health insurance exploded in size in the 1940s, growing from a total enrollment of 20,662,000 in 1940 to nearly 142,334,000 in 1950 (Health Insurance Institute 1961, Source Book, p. 10).
The private health insurance was winning on price:
So successful was commercial insurance that by the early 1950s, commercial plans had more subscribers than Blue Cross and Blue Shield. In 1951, 41.5 million people were enrolled in group or individual hospital insurance plans offered by commercial insurance companies, while only 40.9 million people were enrolled in Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans (Health Insurance Institute 1965, Source Book, p. 14).
There will always be people who are just not insured. This is life, nobody said it was going to be pleasant.
By the end of sixties the government decided that it was going to deal with the then 10-15% of population that had no medical insurance by "providing" them with it. That was the beginning of the end of normal affordable medical insurance and normal affordable health care.
Once the public money was introduced i
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There will always be people who are just not insured. This is life, nobody said it was going to be pleasant.
This is exactly the attitude that I find abhorrent. We don't have to accept the 'life is tough, deal with it' mentality that seems so ingrained in US society. All I see is just a bunch of greedy selfish people who are content to let the world fall apart around their ears, just as long as the gub'ment isn't taking away their money.
Once the public money was introduced into the system, it immediately created an incentive for the insurance companies and health care providers to jack up the prices.
The government didn't have to let them raise the prices. The problem is not the government involvement, but the fact that they tried to get away with half-measures.
Do I see government as the ultimate solution to this problem? A resounding NO! NEVER!
In my home count
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This is exactly the attitude that I find abhorrent. We don't have to accept the 'life is tough, deal with it' mentality that seems so ingrained in US society.
- what, life is not tough? You don't have to deal with it?
Nobody has a RIGHT to any product or service.
There is no right to a Mercedes or a private airplane. Do you know why that is? Because it trumps on other people's rights NOT to provide you with Mercedes and a private airplane at their expense.
This is exactly the same thing, no exceptions. In fact it's worse, because while arguing that right to a Mercedes is stupid, because you don't die if you don't have a Mercedes, you can't argue that in health car
Faster Than Moore's Law - I Should Hope So (Score:2)
"they are outstripping the exponential curves of Moore's Law. By a big margin"
Moore's law simply states that the quantity of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on a circuit doubles every two years.
This is a relatively new area of science. New techniques can be expected to evolve, as would refinements of existing techniques. As it moves from the domain of a very few skilled individuals at universities to more of a commodity where $100 buys you your family tree, economies of scale kick in. And then
Economies of scale (Score:2)
Personally, I blame Jerry Springer.
The dangers of extrapolation (Score:2)
The Economist had an excellent article about this a while back. Using the number of blades in a razor as the example. The made a graph of time, on the bottom, and the number of blades on the left. Then they drew a curve that fit. For a long time, there was only one blade. Then there were two, and that held a while. Then came three, then four, and now we have five. Now, using sound mathematical methods to extrapolate this curve, The Economist projected that by 2020, a razor will have something like 4
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Moore's Law? (Score:3)
Moore's Law [wikipedia.org] is about the number of transistors on a wafer and other directly-related hardware density issues, not about cost - and certainly not the cost of gene sequencing.
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Gordon Moore's paper [intel.com] disagrees. He directly addresses the fact that increased density leads to lower per-component costs.
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Welcome to a Brave New World (Score:1)
quality note (Score:2)
As a person in the field, I have to say, that one has to consider a quality of genomes in the field (at least bacterial genomes). So called "complete genomes" submissions of the past, in the form of full continuous sequences of chromosomes and plasmids of the organism, are staying in the past, almost all of the new submissions are WGS (whole genome sequences), which is basically bunch of "contigs", pieces of sequences not connected together, 10s, 100s and sometimes 1000s of them. (This is a result of adopti
$1999 sequence exome ad in Nature. (Score:2)
Economic of Scale vs Moore's Law? (Score:1)
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Logarithmic (Score:2)
Jaw dropping graphs indeed, especially the Cost per Megabase one. Extend the graph further to the right, and it appears that Moore's law will reach $0 some time in 2033.
They mislabeled the graph. That should be $0.1 in the lower left, not $0. Of course, you could say they are rounding, but then they are rounding to a number more granular than what their chosen Y axis range calls for.
$5,000 Genome (Score:1)
Papers please (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Just two things:
a) why less than 0? Do you get money out of it?
b) let's try not giving you any food for a month and see how well your DNA synthesis goes then...