♦   11   ♦Designer Genes, the Bacteria in Our Guts, and Precision Medicine

In the near future, we will routinely have our genetic material analyzed; late in the next decade, we will be able to download and “print” at home medicines, tissues, and bacteria custom designed to suit our DNA and keep us healthy. In short, we will all be biohackers and amateur geneticists, able to understand how our genes work and how to fix them. That’s because these technologies are moving along the exponential technology curve.

Scientists published the first draft analysis of the human genome in 2001. The effort to sequence a human genome for the first time was a long and costly one. Started by the government-funded Human Genome Project and later augmented by Celera ...

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