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Burn your genes on CD -- for $500,000

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the put-that-on-gnutella dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Venter says he plans to offer the service, with the goal of burning individual human's entire DNA sequences onto shiny compact discs. It will cost about $500,000 per person, says the entrepreneurial scientist who helped decode the human genome. "

2 of 276 comments (clear)

  1. OMFG by chainrust · · Score: 0, Redundant

    I'll do all this for 50 cents outside my home. I am prepared to prick your finger with a needle, and do exactly what Venter is doing with a 1,000,000% discount!

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  2. Re:Digital Life? by glwtta · · Score: 2, Redundant
    sigh, here we go again:

    first of all, we are talking about genotypes and not phenotypes (phenotypes are impossible to put on CD for obvious reasons). secondly, the human genome is roughly 3 Giga Basepairs, which, if you consider that you need 2 bits to store one basepair, gives you just over 715MB, with some compression that happily lives on a CD.

    Of course the vast (vast) majority of that is identical for all people, so you only need to store the differences.

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