What is in your DNA?

How deeply do you want to look into your DNA?
Credit: U.S. Department of Energy Genome Programs

Remember Jim Watson? The guy who co-discovered what DNA looks like? Recently he got to look at the 6 billion letters that make up his DNA. And maybe soon you can get a peek at yours.

In a clever publicity stunt, 454 Life Sciences has sequenced Watson’s DNA to show off how well they can sequence DNA. And they're pretty good at it.

They sequenced Watson's DNA for around one million dollars and did it in just two months. Compare that to the 13 years and 3 billion dollars or so it took to sequence the first human genome!

This is amazing progress. But 454 and a bunch of other companies are trying to get it done faster and cheaper still. A few companies are claiming they'll get the price down to 10,000 dollars by the end of this year. And 1000 dollars sooner rather than later. Wow.

This will be a huge deal if these companies can pull it off. But probably not in the ways that you are thinking.

We actually don't know what most of our DNA does. Essentially we’ll have 6 billion letters of mostly indecipherable code.

Sure we'll be able to quickly see whether we carry any rare genetic diseases. This will definitely affect DNA testing companies. And make these diseases less common as everyone will know whether they are a carrier or not.

But we won't be able to predict whether we will for sure get common diseases like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or diabetes or... We just don't know enough about our DNA and these diseases are too complicated for us to figure these things out anytime soon.

In the short term, the biggest "benefit" of knowing everyone's DNA will be for identification purposes. Things like figuring out who committed a crime. Or who the real father of a child is. We may even be able to tell which identical twin fathered a child or killed somebody.

But even these sorts of things could have huge impacts on society. For example, some studies suggest that around 4-6% of men may not actually be the father of their children.

Some men are looking at eye or hair color or other supposedly simple genetic traits to try to see if their kid is really theirs. None of these is a particularly effective way to determine paternity. But if everyone’s DNA is known, all of these men will have a real chance to figure this out.

Is this outing of mothers a good or a bad thing? What other effects do you think knowing our DNA will have on our lives? And that of society?

Dr. Barry Starr is a Geneticist-in-Residence at The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, CA.