The July 18 New York Times “Science Times” features Nicholas Wade’s story “The Quest for the $1,000 Human Genome”. By some estimates, it now costs about $10-15 million to sequence an entire human genome (down from the $500 million it cost to do the first such sequence as part of the Human Genome Project). The production of a new generation of sequencing machines raise the possibility that the costs of a complete sequence will continue to fall. All of this begs the question of what we will do with all this information if it is available for approximately the same cost as a CT scan.

I talked with a molecular geneticist about this article, and he agreed that the $1,000 genome sequencing is not pie-in-the-sky. It may really happen.

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