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Invitae, the bold little company run by genomics veteran Randy Scott, today announced that it will offer any of its 1500 genetic tests to patients for $475 – so long as they don’t use health insurance to pay for it.

For tests that are going to be paid through a health insurer, the cost will be $950 if the insurer has made Invitae tests in network, and $1,500 if they are not.

“This has been a core part of our business strategy from day one,” Scott says. “The cost of DNA sequencing is coming down.”

Scott has been a major figure in the business of genomics. He ran Incyte when it was a competitor to Craig Venter’s Celera Genomics and Third Rock Ventures founder Mark Levin’s Millennium Pharmaceuticals in the race to build huge databases of genes, and after that he founded Genomic Health, whose breast cancer genetics tests, used to predict whether women will respond to chemotherapy.

The idea behind Invitae is that the plummeting cost of sequencing DNA using machines made by San Diego’s Illumina will...