"Today we are learning the language with which God created life." President Bill Clinton made this remark on the White House lawn on June 2000 to recognize the decoding of the first human genome . As much as anything else, rapid DNA sequencing technology created in large part by geneticist Craig Venter and his colleagues galvanized the research community into finishing the project faster than originally expected. More than 11 years later, however, gene sequencing technology has failed to deliver on its promise to revolutionize preventative medicine, and Venter is not happy about it.

The idea was that gene sequencing would become so cheap--on the order of $1,000--that ordinary people could afford to have their individual genomes sequenced, which their family doctors would use to diagnose their predisposition for disease. Costs have fallen to about $4000, but the bigger problem is that results are often rife with errors. “If [the technology] is going to achieve the level of really impacting medicine the way I’ve always envisioned that it could, it has to become far more accurate.”