Entire human genome sequencing for $100.
My estimate is that the potential for GATTACA is only another decade away.
The View From North Central Idaho
Ramblings on explosives, guns, politics, and sex by a redneck Idaho farm boy who became a software engineer living near Seattle.
I work for a huge player in the up-and-coming genomics market, and it’s actually a pretty cool idea. The cheap, simple, and fast sequencing technologies we have now are going to allow us to personalize drug treatment in the future. While the chance for abuse is obviously there, the technology is certainly amoral.
This is another lesson in why we (all the individuals of humanity) need to pull part of our minds out of the technology of science and give some thought to the ethics. The -cool- stuff is what we will fix, call me an optimist but humans are great at tackling the next big thing. And as a diabetic with a familial history of cancers I’m happy about that and glad to play whatever part in it that I can. But the questions your mom used to ask, the questions about -should- you … , are the ones we really need desperately to apply ourselves to. I’m less optimistic about that then I am about curing cancer.
There is an overwhelming tendency to conflate the possibilities offered by technology on one hand, with government action on the other hand. Given the current, rouge status of our government, that is understandable, but they are certainly not the same thing. The message I take from this then, is that as technology makes more things (abuses) possible, it becomes more and more imperative that we get government out of our personal lives. The nanny state mentality needs to be surgically removed, or purged, from society. This is both a practical and moral issue. It’s the key principle on which this nation was founded;
Rights violations by private citizens are actionable, while right violations by government are institutionalized, they become routine, and each transgression becomes a rationalization for the next (or as I’ve often put it – every little bit of socialism demands just a little bit more).
So it isn’t science or technology that need be suspect, but a government that feels justified and empowered in using science and technology against us.
Sequencing is only Part 1