Researchers analysed thousands of laboratory-made plasmids and discovered that nearly half of them had defects, raising questions of experimental reproducibility.
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They'll be as small as your microwave and cheaper than your laptop. And the powerful tools - future gene sequencing machines - will be able to tell you exactly what you're made of. Someday, they could help keep you healthy.
It took 10 years and $4 billion for the federal government to complete the first sequence of the human genome in 2000. Its equipment filled vast rooms at many campuses.
Now rival scientific teams, including three in the Bay Area, are racing to build tests that can accurately sequence an entire human genome in less than 30 minutes for $1,000 - about a hundredth of the current price. The cheaper tests will make it possible to sequence the genomes of tens of thousands more people, providing vital data about human traits, such as susceptibility to disease.
Virtuoso bioengineers predict that within two years their tests will start to transform medicine much as PCs rocked the world of mainframe computing.
Modern genetics is essentially a giant math problem. Which of our 23,000 genes cause, or protect against, thousands of known illnesses...