Until not too long ago, asking “Who am I?” of oneself often meant undertaking a voyage of self-discovery either through travel to a faraway land or through time-limited visits to a therapist’s couch. We now live in an era that offers a third, possibly cheaper armchair option.

For less than the price of a business-class trip from New York to Europe, all one needs to do is to spit into a vial, wait a few weeks and log in to an online portal to find out exactly who one is — by scrolling through about 98% of one’s genetic code, guided by annotations that explain things such as why it is that one’s chances of developing diabetes could be as high as 52%; or why one’s cholesterol levels are not likely to respond to statin drugs; or if one really is a descendant of French royalty, as claimed by a suspiciously vague family legend.

The revolution that helped push genome sequencing out of the academic lab space and into the healthcare marketplace was made possible by the rapid fall in the cost of sequencing all 3 billion base pairs of the human genome—from around $300 million in 2003 to “the price of a Bentley in 2007 and now to the price of a motorcycle,” according to Professor Richard W. McCombie of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. McCombie and three other researchers on the front lines of this revolution spoke to an eager and enthralled audience of more than 300 who gathered at Grace Auditorium one recent summer evening to learn not just about the science of personal genomics but also about the ethical considerations that factor into a decision to have one’s genome sequenced. Continue reading →