

Bid To Have Your Whole Genome Sequenced On Ebay - kkleiner
http://singularityhub.com/2009/05/04/bid-to-have-your-whole-genome-sequenced-on-ebay/

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davidmathers
Wait,

Venter: $10 Million

2007: $1 Million

2008: $350,000

2009: $5,000

2010: $1,000

Um, like, holy fuck.

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Femur
>Um, like, holy fuck.

No doubt. Exponential trends like these are all over the place (life
expectancy, CPU performance, etc...)

One of my favorites is life expectancy [1]: 1850: 38 1900: 48 1950: 66 2000:
74 2004: ~76

This kind of trending is one of the foundational aspects of Ray Kurzweil and
Co's singularity forecasts.

[1] <http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html>

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nazgulnarsil
um...that progression of life expectancy isn't exponential.

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eru
Perhaps you can fit it to the following form (twiddling with parameters a and
b):

life expectancy = (maximum life expectancy) - a * exp(-time*b)

If yes, you could still call it exponential in a certain sense of the word.
But I doubt that will be very helpful.

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zackattack
Can someone please explain the difference between having your whole genome
sequenced, and the product by 23andme et alia?

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Femur
Having your genome sequenced means reading every 'letter' of your DNA.
23andMe, on the other hand, tests your DNA for 'SNPs' which are defined
variations in human DNA.

A great explanation of SNPs comes from 23 and me's website:
<https://www.23andme.com/gen101/snps/>

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ComputerGuru
Yes, but they do give you an entire dump of your raw Genome that you can save
to your PC... soon enough you'll be able to download a free program to analyze
that data :D

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russss
No, it's not an entire dump. 23andMe only decode certain bits of your DNA
which are known to be interesting - they call this "genotyping" as opposed to
"sequencing", which is decoding the entire genome.

