The Raelian Movement
for those who are not afraid of the future : http://www.rael.org
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Contributed by Joseph Kollar
Source: http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/bulletin/soon-everybody-will-be-sequenced/13856
Soon, everybody will be sequenced
When the first human genome was decoded by the Human Genome Project 10 years ago, it took 13 years and $3 billion.
In some hospitals right now, cancer patients are having their genomes checked before their doctors decide on treatment. Genome scans of newborns with life-threatening problems can help doctors figure out what’s wrong before it’s too late. Researchers around the world are sequencing thousands of people with autism and diabetes, hoping to identify genetic variations specific to those conditions.
Soon, Ion Torrent’s Jonathan Rothberg says, everybody will be sequenced — probably as infants — and will be able to make diet, lifestyle, and medical choices based on specific information, rather than on hunches about vulnerabilities.
Knowledge of a person’s genome will allow specialists to customize medical treatments and drugs for that patient, to maximize effectiveness while minimizing side effects. A routine checkup could start with the doctor checking for “updates” to a patient’s genomic file; if medical research has turned up new data about the patient’s particular set of genes, the doctor would get an alert.
Experts have predicted that spending on genetic tests will skyrocket from about $5 billion in 2010 to as much as $25 billion in 2021.
Several other companies are also racing toward the $1000-genome goal. Some of these sequencers include: Illumina’s HiSeq 2500, Pacific Biosciences’s PacBioRS, and Oxford Nanopore’s GridIon.
Ion Torrent’s newest, printer-sized Ion Proton System (pictured) uses a blood sample and three disposable chips. Each chip has millions of tiny little wells, and as DNA molecules wash over them, their signals are combined into a digital readout. Most of the cost comes from the single-use chip (the chemicals used are cheap).
Since companies are only just starting to sequence individuals, “right now there’s only a handful of genes that we can tell you something about,” Rothberg explains. But if tens of thousands of people are sequenced, people five years from now will start getting statistically significant — and medically actionable — information.
He adds: “I do believe that genome sequencing will have as profound an effect on medicine as clean water, antibiotics, and imaging.”
Image: Ion Torrent
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"Ethics" is simply a last-gasp attempt by deist conservatives and
orthodox dogmatics to keep humanity in ignorance and obscurantism,
through the well tried fermentation of fear, the fear of science and
new technologies.
There is nothing glorious about what our ancestors call history,
it is simply a succession of mistakes, intolerances and violations.
On the contrary, let us embrace Science and the new technologies
unfettered, for it is these which will liberate mankind from the
myth of god, and free us from our age old fears, from disease,
death and the sweat of labour.
Rael
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