The War Goes On

The Science Business Blog at Forbes looks into what it dubs the “gene machine wars.” There, Matthew Herper points out that just weeks after Illumina announced that its HiSeq 2000 could sequence a human genome for about $10,000, that Life Technologies said its SOLiD 4 that could do it for $6,000. Herper says that Illumina won’t lose its place at the top. “Although the news is good for Life and will keep it in the game as the price of decoding the genetic code continues to drop, the specs of this new machine don't seem good enough to upset Illumina's place as the first choice of geneticists,” he writes.