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Those vaguely affordable DNA tests that promise to tell you just how
likely you are to be stricken by some horrible and unavoidable genetic
affliction in the future? They only look at a tiny fraction of the
bits and bobs and bases that make up your genetic code. There's a race
on to develop a quick and inexpensive way to sequence a human's entire
genome, a process that costs about a million dollars now and takes
ages but, via the technique under development at Imperial College
London, could be done in a few minutes for a couple of bucks in 10
years. The process relies on nanopores, which are the go-to tech for
companies trying to pull this off. Basically, a DNA strand is pushed
through a 2nm hole on a silicon chip and, as it moves through, that
chip is able to use an electrical charge to read the strand's coding
sequence. That is then spit out to a supercomputer to crunch the
numbers at a speed of 10 million bases per second and, within minutes,
you too can have some hard data to make you freak out about the future
-- and maybe a place to put your iPod, too.
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