Making Sense of it All

An estimate in Nature says that about 30,000 human genomes will be sequenced this year, "but what's missing, say a growing chorus of researchers, is a way to make sense of what these endless strings of As, Gs, Cs, and Ts mean to individuals and their health," writes David Ewing Duncan at MIT's Technology Review. However, he adds that people in the field are working to rectify that problem. For example, Duncan reports that Complete Genomics' Clifford Reid has called for companies to develop standard processes for collection though analysis of DNA samples while Pacific Bioscience CSO Eric Schadt and Stephen Friend, who used to be at Merck, founded Sage Bionetworks to standardize DNA databases. "This won't happen overnight," Schadt tells Duncan. "But it will be huge, like the Internet."