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JOE PALCA, host:
From NPR, this is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Joe Palca. It cost a lot of money to sequence the first human genome. One estimate is about a half a billion dollars. But that was a decade ago, and prices are going down.
Last year at Stanford, an engineer sequenced his own genome for a comparative pittance, only $50,000, not bad. And now many scientists are saying the $1,000 genome is just around the corner. But what happens when it gets here?
Say your doctor wants to sequence a few of your genes, check up on a few things. At just $1,000, why not just sequence the whole thing and have it on hand for the future?
It might be useful, but it might also give you a lot to worry about. If your genes say you have a predisposition to an incurable disease like Alzheimer's, do you really want to know that? And who's even going to walk you through the hundreds of genes and explain what they all mean?
And how about every time a new gene...