For $1,000, a small California-based company called 23andMe (financed in part by Google) will decode your DNA and tell you whatever it can about your predispositions, health risks, and family traits—for example, whether or not you’re in line for the same heart disease that affected your father and grandfather, which is what the author of the Wired article wondered. (Turns out he’s not, but he’s at a higher risk of developing glaucoma. When one door opens…)
For now, companies are offering genotyping—”the strategic scanning
of your DNA for several hundred thousand of the telltale variations
that make one human different from the next.” It will take a few more
years before anyone can offer (or afford) to sequence all 6 billion
points of a person’s genetic code, but in the meantime, genotyping can
provide a lot of the kind of health-related information many people
would love to know.