Thirteen thousand people are having their genomes uploaded online, along with their photos and complete medical histories. Never mind stealing social security numbers - a few more years of development and people will be able to copy them entirely. And they did it voluntarily, and it's to help every single one of us.
The Personal Genome Project (PGP) is a research effort designed to harness the incredible internet-intellect. Instead of genetics labs having to source their own data, or gain access to the few genomes already available, the PGP aims to make one hundred thousand human genomes available to anyone who wants to have a look. Most of these will be research facilities, of course, but it opens the doors to computer scientists, mathematicians, any interested observer who wants to have a crack at the code of life. The benefits are twofold: established scientists will have more to work with, and if we can harness a tiny fraction of the incredible inventiveness shown online we'll be riding cancer-curing dinosaurs into a forest that grows batteries.
This awesome project requires awesome technology: a single sequence of DNA requires six gigabytes of storage, meaning the PGP is aiming to upload over half a petabyte. If you aren't stunned, it's only because you don't really get that word. The server requirements are staggering but companies like Google, Amazon and Isilon Systems are already queuing up to sort it out. So yeah, those people who make millions because they knew where the future was? They're working on this.
It's also an excellent example of how people are just getting past privacy - half the admission process to the project is explaining to people that everything about them will be online (except the name, but nobody is under any illusions about how easy that'll be to find). But ten minutes on twitter will show that many modern-minded people will share everything with anyone, for good or ill, and this way they're helping cure cancer.
Which is a bit more important than changing your status message every five minutes.
Posted by Luke McKinney.
Personal Genome Project http://www.personalgenomes.org/
Thirteen thousand already in http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=storage&articleId=9133167&taxonomyId=19&intsrc=kc_top
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