PopTech

If you do genomes now, they are on the order of $10,000 to $20,000. By this time next year, we’ll be doing them internally — meaning within the companies that are developing the technologies — for less than $1,000.

The price is dropping faster than Moore’s Law because we are building on 40 years of technology and catching up quickly. So by 2013, it will be less than $1,000. One thousand dollars has been a magic number in the developed world because in the United States we spend $6,000 per person per year on health care. So you can image that if someone is going into a newborn intensive care unit, a $1,000 expense looks pretty attractive because it might save $50,000 in healthcare costs in a week’s time.

And it will keep on getting cheaper. I can predict that within a decade, it will be as cheap as that heel prick. A heel prick and all of the related biochemistry costs about $10.