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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
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
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?
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
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 typical sequencing reaction is good for about 600 bases (well, that actually is a high-end number - but I think Celera has figured things out well enough to make that regularly). Figure you have to sequence at least 12 billion bases since you have to have some overlap on all the fragments in order to assemble them into a singe genome - 3x overcoverage is a very generous estimage. So 12E9 / 600 = 2E7 reactions. Assume you can do one in two hours (which is probably a bit fast) - that means time for 84 reactions in series in one week (not counting the time it takes to assemble it all - corellating all those sequences takes a LOT of CPU). So - 2E7/84 = 238,095 reactions running in parallel at all times. A $100k sequencer can do about 64 at once.
I am a biochemist - but I've been out of the field for about three years. So those are ballpark estimates based on where things were going back then. As I see it - they would need to commit $372M in capital to get an earnings of $650k per week - a 9% return on capital, and I didn't even figure in the cost of the reagents and all the robotics it takes to prep the samples, let alone the janitor that sweeps the floors at night. Now, if there has been a 10-100x increase in sequencing throughput in the last year or two I could believe that this is feasible, but it seems a bit far-fetched. Definitely a Craig Ventner idea...
Then again, that people are even talking about this is very amazing. Keep in mind that only a few years ago they were expecting that the Human Genome still would be undone today - they've been working on it since the '80s. Craig came in and said he'd beat the NIH to the punch by a few years - they changed their methods to come in at a close tie. Now we're talking about being able to do the whole thing in a week. A few years ago the first bacteria was sequenced at less than 1 million bases - and that was BIG news - it took years of work if I recall correctly. At the peak of the Human Genome race Celera was doing one of those each day and then some - mostly because of an ENORMOUS investment of capital as well as a few technology advances.
This makes me wonder if they will make the customers sign a release to giving Ventner access to statistical data within their genome. One question the completed Human Genome did not answer is how genes vary from person to person - and the only way to answer that question is to sequence lots of genomes. If Ventner can get others to pay for the work and then patent the results that would certainly be a good business move.
...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
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
... he got paid to sequence his own. Go figure.
sic transit gloria mundi
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.
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