At least 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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