Straight out of Gattaca. Now, I wonder who will take advantage of this tech. I'm sure potential employers and potential mates will find it irresitible to find out, which will create a whole new area of law.

Cool. Will they be able to tell me if I'm really 1/8 Korean then? 'Cuz my great-grandparents were missionaries in Korea, and my grandmother looks NOTHING like her siblings.

Jacq,

Is it your maternal Grandmother? Cuz an easy way to track that is through mtDNA

How much does a whole genome cost today? Why have they only done one?

Jacqueline, does your grandmother look half-Korean?

James: “Why have they only done one?”

“The DNA samples for the HapMap have come from a total of 270 people.”

http://www.hapmap.org/ hapmappopu...opulations.html

The Hapmap project is an attempt to discover most of the genomic variation in the human populace. Each human has unique mutations, but most variation is shared across broad family groups.

Soon there will be genetic tests to accurately determine a person’s haplotype. (This is far, far easier than sequencing the person’s genome.) The information in the haplotype database will then provide virtually all the useful information concerning that person’s genome. Haplotypes will correlate with disease prognosis and drug response.

Once you know your haplotype, knowing your complete genome won’t give much useful additional information. Medicine isn’t suited to detecting and fixing unique problems.

On the other hand, having the complete genomes for thousands and millions of people would be a boon to scientists. The human population would act as a great experiment where genotype could be compared to phenotype.

It would be interesting to have the genomes for human outliers. Look at the tallest, the shortest, the fattest, the thinnest, the high IQ, the low IQ, the short-lived, the long lived, the strongest, the weakest, etc.

When I read that I did not think of humans. After all, the human genome has already been sequenced. But I see the potential for comparative genomics. I can get a grant and sequence genomes of 30 species of birds for the money I can get in a smallish grant, then do all sorts of comparisons.