J. Craig Venter’s $250 Genome for Consumers
Entering the race to sequence the human genome after the government-sponsored team had a decade head start with a few billion dollars to spend, bio-entrepreneur Craig Venter spent $100m and tied the public project at the finish line. Now, his latest venture is a company called Human Longevity, Inc. (La Jolla, CA) building what may be the world’s largest sequencing laboratory. His aim there is to sequence one million genomes in four years, as a data base for understanding the biological basis of health and long life. Along this path he is offering to sequence an individual’s “exome”—the coding sections of DNA—for $250 a person. The FDA is trying to decide if this is bordering on consumer fraud or a reasonable way to give people actionable knowledge about their biology. MORE
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