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From: ”Perry E. Metzger”
Date: Fri, 01 Jun 2007 09:52:47 -0400
Subject: [ACT] a bit of not-really-geeky news

[Feel free to forward…]

Today’s New York Times reveals that 454 Life Sciences has sequenced
Dr. James Watson’s genome. (For those that don’t remember, Watson was
one of the two discoverers of DNA). The thing that makes this
interesting is that the cost of doing the work has fallen from several
billion (for the original human genome project) to about $1 Million,
and that the 454 people think they will have the price down to
$100,000 very soon. There are those that believe that the $10,000
genome is going to be possible in only a few more years.

Pretty soon, within 20 years at most and probably sooner, it is going
to be possible to sequence a person’s genome for what those of us on
this list would consider an affordable price. This is going to
revolutionize medicine like nothing before. One of the simpler early
changes will be that we are going to know, not guess, which drugs will
help which people, which will cause which side effects in particular
individuals, etc. We are going to gain all sorts of new information
on disease processes, insights into what makes some people smart and
others less so, why one person manages to live to 60 and another to
100. I don’t think we even have a rough sense of everything we’re
going to learn.

Interesting times….

—
Perry E. Metzger

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