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Comment by fao_ | Hacker News Reader

This seems interesting. How long until people are sequenced at birth and their ailments predicted from that? (I know they're already doing it on a small scale, but I'm talking of it as a routine procedure).

How long still until our memories are able to be stored, etc ad nauseum.

Very exciting stuff!

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You should check out Gattaca [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/]. It's a great movie that explores some of the negatives that crop up from a society that genetically sequences all citizens from birth.

I thought that movie pulled the punch. Turns out, the 'normal' guy actually had some genetic defect that SHOULD have excluded him from service. So it wasn't about discrimination after all.

I thought that was the whole point. The movie wasn't about easy answers.

In many ways they were right and he was the inferior human, but this led to horrible discrimination, relegating "natural" humans to second class status (but horrible discrimination built from a series of perfectly reasonable business decisions). It was also a movie about the power of the human will, but it wasn't about will conquering all, it was an exploration of a possible world where our notions of fairness and someone with sufficient drive surely overcoming all obstacles may be completely upended.

I got something else out of it. I thought the guy was a dirty cheat, risking billions in exploration costs just so he could personally be on the mission. What if he'd had a heart attack during the flight? The main plot of the movie torpedoed the big question of discrimination entirely.

And then there was the matter of wearing business suits on a space mission. Just weird.

> What if he'd had a heart attack during the flight?

Yeah, that was part of the point. That was shown multiple times to be a high probability event. There's a reason the movie ends at lift off.

Not really. It explores some of the negatives that crop up from scientifically illiterate parents crippling their child due to their own misinformed decisions. Vincent was sturggling against his hippie antivaxxer parents who wanted a "natural" child. Unfortunately, naturalist audiences interpret the enemy in the film as society and see his parents' decision as pure and noble.

Don't be so patronizing. The film visualizes a possible society where the line between genetic therapy and genetic enhancement is crossed.

From a bioethical perspective, this isn't "Anti-vaxxing", it deals with misconceptions of genetic predeterminism in humans. Sure you can minimize harm by preventing a child born with tay sachs (genetic therapy) - but you're not minimizing harm by picking a child that will be taller and have blue eyes (enhancement) just because they're statistically likely to be more successful in life.

The main character's roommate provided this contrast as a "failed" olympic athlete, whose life was chosen before he was born.

It's on my viewing list! To be honest I don't think that Gattaca at is that much risk of happening. Given the current state of the technology, actual non-vital changes to the embryo (or perhaps even those too) would most likely be banned (It's already banned in many countries, with good reason: [1])

[1]: http://www.geneticsandsociety.org/article.php?id=304)

Exciting but mundane. A lot has been invested but there have been very few useful results. It turns out the genome offers very little more than you already know from living in your body every day.

Mundane for the most part, but horrifying in other aspects.

Imagine if we were able to identify who was likely to be gay back a few decades ago, say during the AIDs scare? Or imagine what would happen even today in places where homosexuals are put to death?

Thanks eggie for your insight. Was wondering if you can give more specifics as to what you think are the challenges in going from a human genome assembly to drug discovery.

There's a wealth of knowledge in there, it just turns out it's incredibly complicated and everything is interrelated (exactly as you'd expect from a system that evolved). The problem is that the media has been selling this idea of personalized medicine for decades now on the premise that we'll find a single gene for every malady and physical advantage and be able to then tweak them at will.

Genome sequencing is extrememly useful for targeting things like cancer treatments[1][2], etc. It's still in its infancy, and needs some more time.

[1](Couldn't find a better source): http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2015/05/05/ibms-wa...

[2]: http://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/types/targeted-...

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