Faster than the Internet

A Chinese company, BGI, employs 167 DNA sequencers, who altogether produce about 2,000 human genomes worth of data every day. Apparently they collect so much data that they outpace the maximum information transfer speeds currently available on the internet, so they have to send out disks with the data on them using FedEx. I actually find it humorous that we are so good at reading DNA sequences now that we have to revert to a somewhat archaic means of data exchange rather than just using the internet. According to the article I read, DNA sequencing is accelerating much faster than Moore’s law allows computing to accelerate – this reminded me of the several mentions and discussion of Moore’s law we had throughout class. I can’t seem to justify sequencing such a vast amount of DNA if the data is too vast to be thoroughly analyzed. It would make much more sense to me if DNA analysts just ramped down their examination pace a little bit and spent more time analyzing the data they extracted.

Supposedly, it’s going to cost under a thousand dollars for one person to have their entire DNA sequence read and examined within a year or two. This is really cool, but I am skeptical, in that I wonder what we can actually do with that data at this point in our technological development. Are we already able to diagnose medical issues by finding irregularities in DNA? I would think that something as scientifically and medically significant as the ability to diagnose problems preventatively via the use of DNA sequencing would have at least made the news, but I have heard next to nothing about this. I also wonder if, when this technology becomes mainstream, people will argue about its ethics. People argue endlessly over the moral correctness of stem cells and stem cell research and I see nothing stopping them from bringing up the very same or similar points about DNA sequencing technology.

I look forward to the future of DNA sequencing as a medical aid, and I especially look forward to it when tie comes cheap enough for everyone to use. Perhaps at some point in the future every newborn child will have their DNA sequenced within the first hours of their life, and perhaps that sort of practice will eliminate infant mortality. Perhaps people will live for 200 years once we can prevent and cure diseases before they become problematic. Pretty much everything seems within the adjacent possible of DNA sequencing and repair.