In 26 Hours, Sick Newborns Go From Genome Scan To Diagnosis (ieee.org)

the_newsbeagle writes: Parsing the first human genome took a decade, but times have changed. Now, within 26 hours, doctors can scan a sick baby's entire genome and analyze the resulting list of mutations to produce a diagnosis. Since genetic diseases are the top cause of death for infants (abstract), rapidly diagnosing a rare genetic disease can be life-saving. The 26-hour pipeline results from automated technologies that handle everything from the genome sequencing to the diagnosis, says the doctor involved: "We want to take humans out of the equation, because we're the bottleneck."

Comments

Re:That cuts both ways

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah there are some ethical reasons not to have a compulsory genome sequence for every newborn in 2015 but the benefits would be amazing. Diagnosis of childhood ailments is just one of them. (Baby mix-ups would be a thing of the past too)

But do you know the real reason we don't do it?

Every time a program like that has been tried a very very uncomfortable fact always becomes clear very fast - The father listed on the birth certificate often doesn't match the genome scan. Something to the tune of 15-30% of the time, even in the nice middle-to-upper class white suburban hospitals where such things get trialed.

We humans like to sleep around a lot. We just don't like to admit it.