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BOSTON -- George Church wants to put his personal genetic blueprint online for all to see -- the sequence of chemical bases that make him who he is, a lanky scientist of Scottish ancestry who has dyslexia, narcolepsy and motion sickness.

And he wants 99,999 other people to follow suit.

The Harvard genetics professor's Personal Genome Project is an attempt to build the only public genomic database that connects genes with diseases. With it, he believes, scientists could correlate more easily many millions of genetic variants with medical and other traits, from asthma to acne, eye color to perfect pitch.

If successful, he says, it would usher in an era of "personalized medicine" -- enabling a consumer to order up his own genetic blueprint and know what diseases might lurk in his future. That could allow him to change his lifestyle to try to avoid them. Or climb K2 now, while he still can.

A better understanding of genes could lead to more effective drugs, proponents say. Couples could learn what diseases might be in store for their children and...