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Comment by LinuxBender | Hacker News Reader

The term "At Home" is very disingenuous. Spitting in a tube at home and then mailing your DNA to a lab is not At Home. A proper at-home test would be a kit that allows you to decode your DNA at home without a single strand DNA or byte of data landing on a system that does not belong to you.

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How long until this is feasible? I've heard of DNA sequencing machines for $2k, but are not easy or reliable.

I would gladly pay $2k to keep my data at home. To me, that is much cheaper than what it would cost to remove genetic data from multiple corporations and governments, if that is even feasible.

a genome is useless without a huge set of algorithms and datasets to analyse the genome

Agreed. That needs to be open source code, checked into a public repo with instructions that the average person can follow.

After a few years, I would expect that code to run on the device that enumerates the DNA.

Perhaps a RasPi with a daughter card or USB device that reads the DNA, similar to blood sugar testers.

I think you guys are onto something. At $100 a pop, my family, just counting out to first cousins, could buy a pretty nice sequencer.

The MinION is approaching this but you need really good prep work to get reliable results.

It wasn't that long ago that sequencing a single genome was several billion dollars. I bet it won't be that many more years until we will have home sequencing machines. Probably we'll chuckle at how we ever thought it was so complicated.

The analysis of your sequence is key. While there are some open source resources (hard for non-experts to use), the big consumer testing companies far and away have better analytical tools.

When anyone can sequence their DNA at home I expect this to change.

and then you have the genes, but zero algorithm to analyse them. feels unlikely that any company would rent offline copies of their analysis solutions, but you never know

Are the services that ancestry and ‘23 and me’ do provided at a loss and made up with the data or is it profitable?

Why aren’t there companies out there doing this at a higher cost without the privacy implications? Just give the user their data and decoding software that is regularly updated with current information.

Seems like low end machines are about $100,000 so it seems like this would work? I would pay 3-4 times as much if I knew I controlled the results.

Where are the privacy implications, most of these privacy "breaches" are just opt-in features, which you don't have to sign up for.

Even this one, which is the most extreme by so far:

> While the FBI does not have the ability to freely browse genetic profiles in the library

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