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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?"
...as to how long it is until someone patents my genes?
Software piracy is victimless theft.
A sucker is born every minute....
"TV, a medium as it is neither rare nor well done." Ernie Kovacs
I'm sure it's not that easy to map someone's genes, but hundreds of thousands of dollars? They'd better tell me what kind of cancer I'll get, and when, for that much.
"Time is an illusion.
Lunchtime doubly so."
-Douglas Adams
David Borowitz
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?
While this is neat and all, and it was an inevitable use of the technology - does this scream "Gattaca" to anyone else? How long before we're doing this for unborn fetuses, and aborting those with serious defects? Or choosing among the choicest embryos?
"Moderate drinking can help prevent amputated limbs" -- Abigail Zuger, NYTimes, 12/31/02
..there's still no gene for fate.
Now here's something you don't want your insurance company getting their hands on....
Increased risk of cancer? Sorry, not covered...
Increased risk of alcoholism? Those driver's insurance premiums just doubled..
Twenties Retirement
"Ever wonder which hollywood stars and starlets share common sequences?" Oprah's grandmother's dirty little secret!" "THE RICH AND POWERFUL: Genetically Inclined?"
no thanks
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?
The neat thing is, the price of this can only come down. I can't see it being cheap enough to be covered by health care (in countries that have such a beast), but imagine being able to plonk down $5000 or so to have your genome mapped - you could then know what to expect not only in your life, but what to expect for your children, especially when both you and your spouse have the same test done. I firmly believe that pre-emptive medical scanning - that is, determining and eliminating the possibility of a given illness before it occurs - will be one of the major scientific breakthroughs of our time.
Two words:
Holy Gattaca!
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.
Craig's company Celera was mapping a suposedly anonymous genome, but then craig admitted it was his dna. As a Celera shareholder, I wonder if that qualifies as a $600k perk that he got.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
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?
I think this would be one of the best investments a person could make. Too bad it will be all of rich people, which will skew the results of any statistics that could pop out of the research. All super rich people must have a gene or two that supplies an aggressive desire for money, and stupid gold digging mates.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
I guess it could be fun to cheat death if you found out about something you had before it affected you.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Why would I pay for something I already own?
Sure, it would be nice to know in advance if I am susceptible to getting diabietes like my grandmother, or heart disease like most of my mother's side of the family. However, if I do all I can to be healthy (i.e., not eating junkfood while laying on my couch all day), there is a significantly less chance of my being afflicted by these ailments. Some things could not be prevented, but I already know I have them (depression, bad eyesight).
If people spend their "pocket change" on this, they may be in for a suprise. They may find that they have the genes for an increased risk of myocardial infarctions (heart attack), but because they have neglected thier health, they may find it hard to change thier lifestyle to a more healthy one. Although many health-related problems cannot be avoided (for instance, Huntington's Disease, which usually doesn't show up untill your 30's), many diseases that you may be high-risk for can be prevented with a proper lifestyle.
--- At my sig, unleash hell.
A Dozen Dancing monkeys? zombie slave? that's rediculous... oh wait...
(for a little off-subject:) my 300th comment! jesus christ i wasted a lot of time on /.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
...and your employer (or insurance company, bank, credit bureau, department of motor vehicles, Department of Homeland Defense, etc.) will do it for you FOR FREE!
With or without your permission.
Perhaps by then someone will offer a service where you can pay your $600K to PREVENT everyone from getting your gene sequence...
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
Imagine how many starving children could be fed if those millionaires donated the $621,500 to charity instead of getting their genes mapped and finding out what illness might kill them.
Oh well, like it would ever happen.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
Rumour/IMDB-Trivia has it that Leelee Sobieski collects locks of hair from major stars appearing with her in films.
:)
So if anybody wanted to buy themselves a prime bevy of Hollywood DNA to make gene maps from (for whatever nefarious cloney-type purposes) she'd be the person to see.
PS. A clone army of Leelees would be nice too
It would be funny to deliver Bill Gates his "Gene Map" with a restrictive End User License Agreement.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
You can check out your ancestry as coded in your DNA, specifically what percentage Caucasian, African, etc. you are.
... he got paid to sequence his own. Go figure.
sic transit gloria mundi
... where the Bill Gates' money gene is. Unfortunately, the subsequence that accounts for it probably expresses the lack of business ethics characteristic, as well.
That is all.
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hmm... thanks for the personal attack. I don't mind my ideas being criticized, but they don't make me lame... anyways...
The difference between this and, say, a credit report is that the credit report is not part of you. It may describe your lack of paying bills, but it only describes a quality of you.
On the other hand, your genome is you. It is what you are - who you are. Credit reports created, modified, and under certain circumstances, destroyed. The information in them changes, so it is necessary to check on it from time to time - the same way you buy current newspapers as opposed to the same issue every day. Your genes are, for the most part, static. They are with you from the time your dad's sperm met with your mom's egg. Credit reports and school transcripts are explicit properites of you, but your genome is implicit.
I'm not arguing with you about the service aspect of this; after all, it is just as much of a service as getting a copy of your credit report. It is just the content that I see differently
--- At my sig, unleash hell.
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
-=-=- Quantum physics - the dreams stuff are made of.
Actually, the constant media harassment was irritating them, so the two parallel (public/private) projects declared the gene to be sequenced BEFORE either project was complete.
The enormous media frenzy that happened as a result took up some extra time, but enabled them to get back to the science in peace - with extra funding in several cases.
Except suckering rich people out of $600K and getting to get your own private copy of their DNA.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
It was inevitable... Microsoft makes people pay for their beta's, and now Celera is making people pay to provide them with more information about the human genome, which would have otherwise cost them $600k a pop to sequence out themselves.
I think this is a good thing, since they will drive down the price, and they will get a broader information base than just Ventner's own genes: what's been sequenced is *a* human genome, not *the* human genome.
On the privacy side of things, I'd just as soon keep the contents of my chromosomes to myself (particularly 6, 11, 12, 17, 21, and 23), thanks, but that said, I'd like to read it myself and compare it to statistical data, without anyone looking over my shoulder, or writing my name down in a database next to the information.
-- Terry
I shouldn't have been so vague in my use of lifestyle. By it, I don't just mean diet and excercise (although it helps). Lifestyle includes state of mind and environment. You could eat well and excercise, but if you live in a run down double-wide and be so depressed that you want to shoot yourself. Generally, I would not consider this a healthy lifestyle.
--- At my sig, unleash hell.
I see alot of comments joking about already owning their gene map and about releasing their map under the GPL.
No, you don't and no, you can't.
Most of the genes in your body are already patented, trademarked, and/or copyrighted. Those that aren't will be within the next few years.
We don't own our own bodies.
I hope that literally scares the shit out of you. It did to me: I locked myself in my bathroom until I could cope with the insanity of some corporation owning the natural devices that construct humans.
Wired had a very informative article on this some time back. Also, you can Google for the info and you'll find it.
What really scares me is that I've got at least 80 years left to live. I'm going to be fighting and putting up with a lot of shit before I can finally rest.
It'd be nice if some of you would give me a hand.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
"There! Now no one can say I don't own John Larroquette's spine!"
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Because gene analysis is mainly an information enterprise, it will follow Moore's Law and drop a zero in price every five years or so. The first reason is that gene analysis is computer intensive. Celera and the Human Genome Project own some of the largest computer complexes in he world for reassembling shotgun gene pieces. Thus gene analysis will piggy back computer advances.
Second, gene analysis is getting smarter. Coding genes only occupy 2% of the genome. Of this, only 0.1% differs between individual beings. this cuts the analysis problem from 3.2 billion bases to about 100,000 bases. Mapping which 100,000 bases are important is the next stage of technology.
In summary, instead of a month and $600K, in 20 years your should do this in an hour for $50.
I don't know Gattaca, outside of having the vague notion that it was dystopian. But you might look into an old Heinlein novel called "Beyond This Horizon". He envisions a society that uses this kind of technique, but which is also quite libertarian. (Mind you, he was quite down on genetic modification rather than selection...)
The technology does not determine the kind of society. It determines the range of kinds of societies. We already have all the technical capability needed to create a truly dystopian society, and we have had it for decades. (We seem to be edging that way, but certainly not at a rate limited by technical capabilities.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
>
> Inevitably, most people would stumble around a bit, and then finally settle on "neither", because nobody wants to live knowing that they'd only have 10 or so years left or this world, nor knowing that each time they stepped on an airplane could be their last.
I'll buy the argument for "method" but have never understood the argument for "date". If we assume our fate is predetermined (which we have to, for the question is meaningless without it), why wouldn't anyone want to know the date of their death?
If I have 80 years to go, I can invest long-term, and should probably keep my current job for another decade or two.
If I have 10 years to go, I can either work for another 5 years and live for 5 years of a moderate party lifestyle, or retire tomorrow and read Slashdot and play CounterStrike for the rest of my days.
If I have one year left, I can tell my boss to eat my shorts now, buy a Ferrari and a couple of hookers tomorrow, and haul ass across America, leaving a trail of burned rubber, pissed-off cops, 10-20 dead Black Angus cattle, and 200 very happy bartenders in my wake. W00T!