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Direct RNA sequencing can be done with the MinION as well, no hardware change needed:

https://store.nanoporetech.com...

Depending on how important it is to sequence all RNA, polyadenylation prior to sequencing might also be needed.

I have ignored some of your points. You asked about fixing medicine, wasting money on R&D, and such.
There are tons of break-throughs which can bring the costs down.

Here's an example of a pocket DNA sequencer, that, for about $2k, can sequence your genome overnight. So you could already personally find out whether you have any genetic predispositions, and get an early start on e.g. diabetes or heart disease. Prevention is the key, obviously. Same way you would sequence your tumor to see what went wrong, and how it could be targeted.
You can make a customized AAV virus for gene therapy for about $8k, today.

Why none of this already part of routine "Obamacare" is beyond me.

(by the way, I am not suggesting you try the Nanopore sequencer thing. It apparently works very well, but you would need a master's degree in genetics or mol. bio to do anything with the data, or be prepared to spend 2-4 months studying up online)

It always annoys me how here, on slashdot, for nerds, we love technology and advances EXCEPT WHEN IT COMES TO BIOLOGY. Then it's nothing but "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" or GATTACA, or I am legend or zombies.

Yes, technology has downsides and dangers. All technology does. Always. Yes, you need to be aware of it. No, it is not going to cause a dystopian future or apocalypse just because that was the premise of a movie. A lot of other things would have to fail for us to reach gattaca. For example, we'd have to be dumb enough to allow discrimination based on genetics, and we'd have to for some reason decide that nature was all that matters when it comes to nature vs nurture. But given the patriot act and other current events, I'd say we can create a dystopian future for ourselves even if we stopped all scientific progress.

Instantaneous sequencing would be extremely useful in medicine. There's no way to quantify it, but I'm going to say this technology is approximately a billion times more likely to save your life than it is to cause you to be a discriminated underclass of people who are outcasts due to genetics. Anyway its a billion times a billion times more likely this will amount to nothing more than marketing hype. I'm still waiting on this to show up in my lab.

But bigger point: either don't fear biotech advances, or at least be equal: every article about faster or better computer components, how about we fret about the Matrix or Skynet or a million other scifi dystopian works of fiction that involve computers rather than biotech.

Hypocritical Luddites...

I'm told working with RNA's a bitch and a half; while bleach will clean up (sterilize) any stray bacterial cells, a lab handling RNA has to be washed down with an eye-wateringly expensive RNAse cleaner to prevent any stray molecules from contaminating your sample and being amplified into the billions of copies by your next round of PCR. While you probably won't get a 1:1 copy of the foreign RNA, you'll ruin any hope of making a specifically selective test, or getting clean data from your next step. Good shotgun sequencers should be able to isolate the foreign sequence and output two strong signals instead of one, but my university didn't have one at the time; "sequencer" was a grad student's job description, not a piece of equipment. (That's changed recently)

In biological systems, DNA is usually more robust. Chemical or enzymatic attack? DNA is tougher. Funnily enough, RNA is more resistant to UV, so you can't use that to sterilize a lab bench without enough of a dose that it starts damaging plastic, too. RNA may be easier to melt, or "unzip" too, but it's still a pain in the ass to get every last bit of it.

If you mean storing a high-quality sample and guaranteeing it'll be intact, that may be rather dicey - but the curious can check out a forum post I found on it. Also, I recall something about if RNA has -OH groups and is unstable in alkaline environments, it could be autocatalytic; this wasn't a problem when I was studying to be a gene jock - we stuck to working with DNA.

We could be close to this with the MinIon sequencer from Oxford Nanopore.

Less than $1000, disposable and about the size of a USB stick. Connect it to your computer, drop a sample into a hole in the top and a sequence file starts building up on your hard drive.

It's due to be released in a couple of months when we'll see if this is as good as it sounds.