Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Purchase Your Personal Gene Map

Posted by timothy on from the priceless dept.

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?"

7 of 266 comments (clear)

  1. Neat by whereiswaldo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Neat by bmetzler · · Score: 5, Interesting
      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
  2. Discoveries? by Galahad2 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

  3. Money is no object by tmark · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. How big is my source? by geoffeg · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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

    1. Re:How big is my source? by mbessey · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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

  5. It's really not much data at all by mbessey · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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