Solve Genomics with the Blockchain? Why the Hell Not

Think of all the information tucked into those sinuous DNA spirals--and the life-saving discoveries that some smart machine learning could pull out if it had lots and lots and lots of it to learn from. But first, researchers need a lot of genomes. The bigger the database, the better--only about a million people have taken it all off, as it were, and gotten their whole genomes sequenced. Even though about 12 million people have gotten at least some of their genes unravelled--mostly by companies like 23andme or Ancestry--that level of detail isn't enough for a precision-medicine future. So far, getting your whole genome sequenced won't tell you as much as you might hope about your health.