The $1,000 Genome, and the New Problem of Having Too Much Information
The next sequence is even cheaper Scientists needed $3 billion and 13 years to sequence the three billion base pairs encoded in a single human genome-the first time. By 2011, eight years after that first project was completed, the cost of sequencing a human genome had fallen to $5,000, in a process that took just a few weeks. And in January, Jonathan Rothberg, a chemical engineer and the founder of the biotech company Ion Torrent, unveiled an approach that is faster and cheaper still. He says his machine will be able to sequence a human genome, some 3.2 gigabytes' worth of data, in two hours for just $1,000. Now thousands, and soon enough millions, of patients will have their genetic makeup laid bare, which presents an entirely new problem: How to analyze all that information? Rothberg had introduced the first sequencing machine that could perform millions of chemical reactions on a...