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Ten years from now every new-born will know wether he’ll suffer from diabetes in his teens or a heart condition in his fifties. Not from a pediatric psychic, that is not in sight yet, but from the analysis of the genetic code of the baby. The costs of DNA mapping have already sensibly diminished, but they will drop to less than $1000 in the near future, making this a standard after-birth procedure. The human Genome Project, the first human genome sequencing ever published was completed in 2001 at a cost of $4 billion. Two years ago scientists James Watson and Craig Venter had their genomes mapped with about $1m, and Dr. Stephen Quake, a Stanford engineer, recently decoded is own with less than $50,000 and just a three-member staff. Dr Jay Flately from Illumina, an American company specialized in personalized medicine development by applying innovative genetic technologies, stated in an interview with The Times that most kids will have this simple procedure done within 2019. It will be enough to collect a drop of blood with a heel-prick blood test, similar to the one that is already used to screen for inherited diseases such as cystic fibrosis. “The limitations are sociological; when and where people think it can be applied, the concerns people have about misinformation and the background ethics questions. I think those are actually going to be the limits that push it out to a ten-year timeframe” he said. This procedure will in fact raise eyebrows on privacy concerns: what if an insurance company manages to get its hands on your own sequenced genome and prices your health insurance accordingly? But, as Dr. Flatley added “people have to recognize that this horse is out of the barn, and that your genome probably can’t be protected, because everywhere you go you leave your genome behind.” A used coffee mug or a fallen out hair are enough to track a person’s DNA anyway. This is why it will be very important for proper legislation to be passed. The benefits will be so great that will most likely wipe out the initial concerns. Knowing which kind of cancer or cariovascular problems could affect us, is crucial to early prevention and drugs and dietary advice.