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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."
See if they can find the chair-throwing gene...
Ignore this signature. By order.
Maybe MY genes are worth decoding too, despite the fact that I'm not a C-level executive at a Fortune 500 company.
Welcome to the World of Tomorrow! Where only the obscenely rich can afford immortality for themselves and their families, and the rest of us are left out in the cold... we are called "invalids" with an icy, sneering indifference by the wealthy, geneticly gifted sons of Paul Allen and Larry Page.
Wake up people. There's a war on the horizon and the denying this technology to us proles us is going to be a major weapon.
they were encrypted.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
"And to sweeten the deal, we've hidden special codes somewhere the spleen section section of the genes of everyone on earth. Make sure to check these codes at www.mountaindew.com to win your free iTunes music: and one prize winner WILL RECEIVE A NEW NISSAN XTERRA!"
Where were you when the voynix came?
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.
Ignore this signature. By order.
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.
I'm sponsoring the XXX prize for two women willing to accept my genetic code at the same time.
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.
how does one become a wealthy geologist?
Actually Sony's Gene Rights Management technology rootkits your own genes, so that if you attempt to copy Steve Allen's DNA without permission they can basically turn you into someone else.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Given you can't do crap for $10K these guys are getting a pretty good deal. As for our genetic differences, I've seen the pictures of Larry Page in a speedo and I am proud to say we have clear genetic differences.
Wouldn't that be the 'Y' prize? They had better make it take a while. There's only one left.
The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer. - Edward R. Murrow
Before this turns into a large nature vs. nurture argument, I thought I'd pipe in here with a really great paper that really throws a wrench into the argument.
In one of the largest Nature vs. Nurture shakeups, it was shown that the maternal behavior of the mother can cause epigenetic variations in the child that ultimately cause the child to grow up to become a nurturing mother or a non-nurturing mother (http://www.neurobio.ucla.edu/~lmp/Meaney.pdf ). This is one of the biggest breakthroughs in Neurobiology connecting specific epigenetic alterations to behavioral response (yes, there were controls, switching mothers/children, read the paper for the full details).
However, the genetic alterations here are not on the sequence level, but rather on the Epigenetic level (the state of the DNA). Therefore sequencing the genome of two identical twins who had different mothers (one nurturing, one non-nurturing), can lead to entirely different epigenetic levels, yet the sequences would be identical. The take home message here is that while the underlying sequence is important and full sequences will certainly help in the understanding of biology, the underlying state is just as important. This epigenetic variation is also one of the causes of cellular differentiation (stem cells, etc.), and also certain cancer types. In an effort to make my post slightly controversial, I'd go as far to say that a high throughput epigenetic snapshot is probably more important for understanding success in individuals than the underlying DNA sequence (however, it is my hope that a high-throughput sequencing approach would be a first step towards a high-throughput epigenetic approach, as they are tightly coupled in a sense)-- as well as providing great breakthroughs in other areas of biology (tissue regeneration, cancer treatement, etc.).
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?
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