Forget a book, read my genes!!!

Can i splice and read your DNA for $1,000? Yes folks, even looking at your future is now here. This winter a new industry will make its mark: Companies will take a just an inling of your DNA, scan it, and tell you about your genetic future, as well as your ancestral past. A much-anticipated Silicon Valley startup called 23andMe offers a thorough tour of your genealogy, tracing your DNA back through the eons. Sign up members of your family and you will be able to track down generations of inheritance for traits like athletic endurance absolute bitter-taste blindness, or even plain intelligence. The company will also tell you which diseases and conditions are associated with your genes — from colorectal cancer to lactose intolerance to just about any sickness we know of — giving you the ability to take preventive action. Another company, called Navigenics, focuses on matching your genes to current medical research, calculating your genetic risk for a range of diseases and tellin u that u stank too! J/k.

The advent of retail genomics will make an uber-rare experience commonplace. Simply by spitting into a vial, customers of these companies will become early adopters of personalized medicine. We will not live according to what has happened to us (that knee injury from high school, that groin we pulled in college or that 40 pounds we've gained since college) nor according to what happens to most Americans (the one-in-four chance men have of getting cancer, or women have of dying from some type of heart disease, or anyone has for obesity). We will live according to what our own specific genetic risks predispose us toward.
Whick kinda makes sense. At Illumina, a San Diego biotech firm, customer DNA is analyzed in the "decoding bay."

This brand new industry utilizes science that is just beginning to emerge. Genomics is in its earliest days: The Human Genome Project, the landmark effort to sequence the DNA of our species, was completed in 2003, and the research built on that milestone is only now being published. The fact that any consumer with $1,000 can now capitalize on this project is a rare case of groundbreaking science overlapping with an all too eager marketplace. For the moment, 23andMe and Navigenics offer genotyping: the strategic scanning of your DNA for several hundred thousand of the telltale variations that make one human different from the next. But in a few years, as the price of sequencing the entire genome drops below $1,000, all 6 billion points of your genetic code will be opened to scrutiny. That will really be something!

To act on this data, were gonna need to understand it. This pretty much means companies must translate the demanding argot of genetics — alleles and phenotypes and centromeres — into something approachable, even making it easy, for physicians and laypersons around the world. I mean yeah its something for a doctor to tell patients that smoking is bad for them, or that their cholesterol count is high. But how are you supposed to react when doc tells you that you have a genetic variation at rs69832678914308 that's been associated with a 30 percent higher risk of rectal cancer? And what are doctors, who are probably untrained in and unprepared for genomic medicine, to do when a patient comes in wielding a printout that indicates a particular variation of a particular gene? Not much unless they are a pro at this brand new science!!

This new age of genomics comes with great opportunity — but also great possible quandaries. In the genomic age, we'll no longer have the problem of not knowing, but we will face the burden of "do i want to know at all??". We'll learn what might be best for us in life and then have to reckon with the risk and perhaps the guilt of not acting on that knowledge. We may live in fear of an oncoming disease or other unhealthy misfortune. We will, counterintuitively, face even more pressure to conduct our lives alot more carefully, strictly, and cautiously; we'll most likely practice the art of predictive diagnosis and receive a demanding roster of things to avoid, things to do, and treatments to receive — long before there's any physical evidence of disease. This could drive some neurotics mad!! And, yes, we will know whether our children are predisposed to certain traits or talents — athletics or music or languages — and with that knowledge in hand encourage them to pursue certain paths. In short, life will become a little more like a game of strategy, where we're always playing the percentages, trying to optimize our outcomes. But it seems like it is right now! "These are enormously large calculations," says Leroy Hood, a pioneer of genomic sequencing and cofounder of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, who insinuates that if we pay attention and get the mathematics right, "it's not a stretch to say that we could increase our productive lifespans by at least a decade."

That's saying alot! We'll remember you said that Mr. Hood. Don't forget that some of the stakes are owned by Google's very own co-founder Sergey Brin who has family ties with the project. I mean his wife, Anne Wojcicki, is co-founder of 23andme after all. So they definitely have funding and now they have the attention. There are an incredible number of volunteers for this new technology so we'll see how the industry of "Gene-Reading" fares. What a day!