Contest To Sequence Centenarians Kicks Off

ananyo writes "The first competitor has swaggered up to the starting line for a contest that aims to push the limits of genome-sequencing technology. The X Prize Foundation of Playa Vista, California, is offering a US$10 million prize to the first team to accurately sequence the genomes of 100 people aged 100 or older, for $1,000 or less apiece and within 30 days. Ion Torrent, part of Life Technologies of Carlsbad, California, believes that its semiconductor-based technology gives it a shot, and on 23 July it announced that it will compete. The Archon Genomics X Prize competition, to be held in September 2013, is intended to spur technology, boost accuracy and drive down costs — currently $3,000–5,000 per genome. Peter Diamandis, the X Prize Foundation's chief executive, says that the contest will help to establish a standard for a 'medical grade' genome, with the high accuracy needed to diagnose or treat a patient. This time, the X prize Foundation has relaxed the time frame, allowing competitors 30 days — rather than the 10 specified by the 2006 contest — and focused on centenarians, who might carry gene variants promoting longevity. The winning team will be the first to sequence all 100 genomes to 98% completion, with less than one error per million base pairs, and to determine which variants appear on which of the paired chromosomes."

Comments

Margin of Error

[stephanruby]

Hopefully, they all told truth about their age and their age was double-checked, triple-checked, and quadruple-checked in different ways before they were selected for this study.

Why's this a good thing?

[DNS-and-BIND]

From a societal standpoint, it's not good to have elderly around, draining resources and hogging housing. In the UK recently, the elderly are "selfishly" (not my words, the government's) continuing to occupy family homes judged to be too large for them. There has been a drive to confiscate old people's houses as they have too many bedrooms, and multiple families could be housed in the same place. It's only the old people's selfishness that makes them want to live in such extravagant surroundings. The government pays fair market price for the dwelling, evicts the occupant into more suitably sized housing, and society benefits. The elderly consume fantastically large amounts of healthcare to allow them to live to such an advanced age. The best thing for society as a whole is for people to pass on just after they cease contributing taxes to the system. That way, much money is saved on pensions, social welfare, hospital care, and so on. In fact, in many cases, euthanasia is a preferable solution to old age, as is done routinely in The Netherlands.

Given all this, why is increasing longevity a good thing? How does it help society? Taxes cannot be paid by people who don't work.

Before you click that "-1 Troll" button, think about it for a moment. Attempt to formulate a thinking response. This isn't a troll, this is how many rational, educated people in government think about the elderly problem. Let's have some real discussion instead of burying real-world opinions with which we disagree.

Re:Why's this a good thing?

[ledow]

Increasing longevity would presumably increase the useful working life of a person too. That increases taxes. Every year you get out of a person before they retire is another nine months they can "live for free" once they do retire (think about it - you work for, say, 45 years and you're retired for, what? 20-30?). Assuming that longevity also brings increase in health and working ages (which historically it has done - people used to die before they reached 30, now 65 is the retirement age!)

As people get live longer, they also feel less need to breed immediately. This means fewer children, more widely spaced. This is why women are now putting off having children until into their thirties while a few generations ago that was impossible and they were more likely pregnant before 20. This, however, means that not only are there fewer children to support, but fewer working adults to support the generation about them later on (so it's 50-50).

But there are numerous unquantifiable side-benefits. Living longer as an individual means that things like scientific research can go on for longer. We don't lose talent just through old-age. We keep geniuses around who have 50+ years experience of quantum physics, who can teach the next generation. This also means better education, better research, but comes at the cost of longer-held positions, less job opportunities, and longer time spent in education.

So, basically, it's not an all-lose situation. Longevity has been increasing for centuries, if not millennia. It has advantages and disadvantages that, on the whole, balance out and even provide "profit".

The problem we have is not longevity, per se - it's failing to adequately save for that retirement when working, and stopping working too early because we've hit an arbitrary age. The UK health system is also set up to encourage people to not save for private healthcare, which can be a problem when it comes to an ageing population (but I wouldn't give it up for the world, despite all the problems with it!) - other systems fare better under this sort of strain.

Longer lives do not mean longer retirements, necessarily. If it works out, it means longer working life, shorter retirements, better pension coverage and MORE tax, not less.