November 10th, 2010

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports:

Like many visionary ideas, George Church’s notion of personal genetic sequencing seemed unrealistic at first, if not downright crazy.

Just 10 years ago, the government had spent $3 billion to read the full genetic codes of a handful of volunteers as the basis of the Human Genome Project. That took armies of researchers most of the 1990s to accomplish. It seemed a bit unwieldy to imagine doing this for individual patients.

But Church, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, insisted that it would not only be possible, but would bring the benefits of the genome project to real people, allowing doctors to predict future illnesses and make otherwise difficult diagnoses.

Read more here.