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Saturday 14 January 2012

A "negative cost" for the genome in the future?

Gloria Oh/MEDILL Northwestern University's Genetics Community offers insight into the $1,000 genome and dropping costs as well its implications on clinical application.
The short movie is accompanied by an article on Medill Reports discussing some of the implications of the dropping cost of a full genome sequence. It contains a couple considerations by Atul Butte, Associate Professor and Division Chief of Systems Medicine in the Department of Pediatrics at Stanford University School of Medicine: “There’s no place to put the hard disk. If we were to save a short-reads per patient, it would be a terabyte of information. It would be cheaper to re-sequence and retrieve a person’s DNA at a trivial zero-genome cost then to store the sequence.” Butte also adds that “we’ll eventually head to a zero-dollar genome, you could imagine a negative genome in the future, where the insurance pays for your genome sequence.
Although we read similar statements before, it's still shocking to think about it now.

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