Slashdot Mirror
Burn your genes on CD -- for $500,000
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. "
If you bring your own disc, that'll only come to $499,990.00
than trying to find a suitable, willing girl to carry my genes, and probably almost as much fun, too!
cool, now i can get the DNA sequence of someone i really dont like, and use it as a coaster for my coffee at work.
"gee, if im using your genetic sequence to keep my desk clean, chances are i dont really care for your opinion either, huh?"
This website says that we have about 3 billion base pairs, 30 thousand of which are genes (the rest is the mysterious "junk dna"). There are 4 base pairs, therefore each base pair is 2 bits of data. That's about 7.5kb for all the genes, and 715MB for every base pair - which after compression should fit comfortably on a standard CD.
burning individual human's entire DNA sequences onto shiny compact discs
I can do that for less than $500k:
Ingredients:
One CD (make use of an AOL one for a change).
A skin or blood sample.
Preperation:
Put all the ingredients into a casserole dish, preheat oven to gas mark 9. When ready place casserole dish into oven and leave until black acrid smoke comes out of the oven. Et Voila, your DNA 'burned' onto a CD.
A nice keep sake for years to come! And as Nigella Lawson would say, "Absolutely Scrumptious"!
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
I suggest you contact a doctor immediately.
According to this, you are going to die from insanely shortened chromosome #1 any second now.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Yes and no. I just tried gzipping chromosome 22 (one of the smallest) - it goes from 35MB to 10MB. The entire genome is about 3.5GB. However, keep in mind that the repetition isn't perfect, because from what I understand repeat motifs are more like regex's than simply the same sequence over and over again. A custom compression scheme could probably do much better than gzip.
It's alway good to have a backup copy of your genes in case you have to reformat / reinstall yourself.
Ideology is for ideots.