In this accessible talk from TEDxBoston, Richard Resnick shows how cheap and fast genome sequencing is about to turn health care (and insurance, and politics) upside down.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the human genome. (Applause) Chromosome one, top left.Bottom right are the sex chromosomes. Women have two copies of that big X chromosome; men have the Xand, of course, that small copy of the Y. Sorry boys, but it's just a tiny little thing that makes you different.So if you zoom in on this genome, then what you see, of course, is this double helix structure -- the code of life spelled out with these four biochemical letters, or we call them bases, right: A, C, G and T. How many are there in the human genome? Three billion. Is that a big number? Well, everybody can throw around big numbers. But in fact, if I were to place one base on each pixel of this 1280 by 800 resolution screen, we would need 3,000 screens to take a look at the genome. So it's really quite big.
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