Figured I should try to decompile myself. The first step would be get a full dump of my DNA base pairs as letters. Looks like that’s not going to be easy though. Even a DNA stain takes a lot of steps (and I’ll probably never be allowed to do the radioactive steps myself). The real goal here is that with current US law, I should copyright myself (I’m the first performance of the specific base pair “idea”) and possibly patent myself (my methods are a unique variation of other methods).
Obviously this doesn’t take into account my immune system or my memories, but I figure it’s a good start. At like just under 10 billion base pairs, that’s a 10GB program. I think Inkscape is only 45M or so, and that’s not even counting shared libraries.
Since I don’t really want to share my DNA with a company (I’ve got to be the first to copyright it), I wanted to find out what it would take to sequence at home. Since a sequencer is in the $100k price range, that’s not really going to happen. Talking to my NIH-employed friend techne23, she suggested a possible “cheap” way to do it would be in pieces, doing PCRs on specific SNPs, and send those out for sequencing to get back base pair letters. For example, on a gene, the red ones here are considered “interesting”. The PCR machines can be had for cheap, too.
So, in summary:
- need all the standard lab stuff (centifuge, gloves, tips, pipets, tubes, autoclave, glassware, etc)
- need chemicals to isolate my DNA
- need a little space in my freezer to store my DNA
- need to buy PCR reagents, about $100 for 50-100 reactions
- need two base pair-specific primers at $40 total for up to 500 base pairs per PCR
- need thermal cycler to do the PCR in
- need electrophoresis equipment to see if the PCR worked (maybe reuse my UV EPROM wiper?)
- need toxic (careful!) reagents for the electrophoresis
- need a sequencing company that is willing to work with a non-University
- need FedEx account to ship PCR to sequencers :)
Or I can spend crazy money doing thousands of SNPs at once in microarrays. (Or wait until they’re in every doctor’s office.)
© 2005, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.