The Next X Prize

BlueCup writes "The X Prize Foundation, sponsor of a widely noted 2004 award for developing a reusable rocket suitable for private space travel, says it is now teaming with a wealthy Canadian geologist to offer $10 million to any team that can completely decode the genes of 100 people in 10 days. And that's not all. As an encore, the winning team will be paid $1 million more to decode another 100 people's genes, including a bevy of wealthy donors and celebrities. Already accepted for future decoding: Google Inc. co-founder Larry Page, Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul G. Allen and former junk-bond king Michael Milken."

Comments

From TFA

[cp.tar]

Are the rich and famous really different from the rest of us, down in their genes?

Hmmm... is there a gene (or a set of genes) responsible for, say, the desire to make huge amounts of money?
Or are there actual genes which determine how much introverted or extroverted a person is?

Of course, I don't think the rich and the famous are substantially different from the rest of you, but still... it's a valid question.

I'll take the coach seats.

[Verdict]

So a hundred wealth donors only had to put up 10,000 to get their genes decoded in 10 days? That means I can sign up for the 100 day process for only $1000, and the 1000 day process for just $100. I can wait three years.

1000 TB

[fragles]

You just need to buy lot of 454 sequencing devices (http://www.454.com/) or Solexa http://www.solexa.com/wt/page/index and have big datacenter. Then you use those sequencers to re-sequence those 100 people and compare them with the reference human sequence. Big datacenter - You will need 30 Solexa devices and around 1000 TB data storage this is a nice task for Google datacenter.

"wealthy Canadian geologist"

[Anonymous Coward]

how does one become a wealthy geologist?

What exactly does "decode" mean here?

[m0nstr42]

Maybe TFA is more precise, or maybe it's more obvious to someone who does genetics, or maybe I'm tragically out of the loop, but what exactly does it mean to "decode" the genes of 100 humans? It seems like the real "decoding" would be to look at the ensemble of human genomes and match sequences and combinations of sequences in certain locations with specific phenotypes. That is, after all, the Holy Grail of genetic research isn't it? Given that information, looking at any given person's DNA and classifying their phenotype should be a more-or-less trivial task. Maybe it is the pure procedural/logistical problem of processing that much information in that amount of time that they are after?