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Comment by eloff | Hacker News Reader

I think you're missing the part where you have to send the tube to a lab to do the actual sequencing. At that point they have your data, and even if there were to be a provider that says they don't keep it, that's about as credible as all the VPNs which "don't keep logs" where we later discover, whoops, they lied...

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Right, maybe this is where I’m being ignorant, but would there be a way to do the actual sequencing down to a consumer device?

I presume the machines used are pretty complex.

DNA sequencers are not that expensive [1]. And I’m told the actual lab work is not that hard or dangerous (high school level?).

I fact, the database correlating millions of people’s DNA with their medical history and migration history is probably the hardest part.

But the potential market is there. I’d gladly play $1000 to have my sequence, even unanalyzed, with the knowledge no one else does.

1 cursory look at eBay. I don’t know if those sequencing machines are good for human DNA - I hate bio.

I'm assuming that you meant to link a MinION (as it's the only device I know of at that price point). They would be fit for human DNA, though a single flow cell (consumable part that will degrade after X amount of DNA read) might not be quite enough to read a whole human genome with the desired accuracy.

So if you purchase all the consumables (flow cells + chemicals) in low quantities, a single human genome will probably run you around $2000 in materials. With the bulk orders from their website you could get it down to half of that (so probably even more if you were doing really big bulk orders).

$1000-2000 seems like the price point I was expecting for a full offline solution. It does seem too high for the mainstream market when 23AndMe kits are going for $99 despite all the privacy concerns.

Well, you could sue for breach of contract and have penalties in the contract. After all, you rely on other people to do their jobs in other critical aspects of your life

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