The other groups (Applid Bio, Illumina) are promoting old technology to do it which is why it is costly and labor intensive. That is how I think the new start up companies will get around Moore’s law. I attended a talk given by one of these companies and they sold one of their sequencing nano chips for about $800 and I think it cost them less than $100 to produce. Let’s see if clinicians buy off on it in the near future.

Also, the article does not explain how such unbelievable cost reductions can happen. Why should they happen at a rate so much faster than Moore’s Law (as the computational power doing the sequencing would be the main determinant of cost)?

You say that AB claim they will be able to do a genome for $10k but that only includes the fluorescent reagent costs, not the cost of instrument ($500k amortised over three years, say) and accompanying computing capital costs, the cost of labour, informatics, failed runs, sample preparation (a significant and complex procedure) and much more. All the current systems have a glass ceiling of cost because of these limitations.

Also, you could do a cheap genome that is not very accurate and therefore basically useless. Useful genomes are more expensive.

If we are to talk about the real cost of a human genome then all this needs to be taken into account. The only recent *published* costs of a quality human genome were actually $250k and $500k. See Nature November 2008.

Be smart – don’t believe the hype!