In Office Full Genomic Analysis

I posted about two weeks ago about an interview at Spiegel Online with Harvard biologist George Church who asserts that DNA not only soon can but will be used to create synthetic Neanderthals and other animals, as well as changing individual's genomes, and even will be used to design machines. (A follow-up post a few days later reported on two very promising studies in the use of DNA, particularly as a memory device for computation.)

Dr. Church, it turns out, has been very busy.

As reported in The New York Times, Knome, a company he co-founded and for which he is the chief scientific adviser  has just released a full genome sequencer that is the size of a file cabinet and costs about $125 K. It used to cost $250 K to sequence the full genome of one individual. In short, this is a pretty incredible development.

The science of DNA engineering is moving ahead extraordinarily fast -- must faster than our culture.