According to Computerworld magazine, 13,000 people have volunteered for the Personal Genome Project since it put out a request last month. Apparently, this has allowed the organizers to perform some triage:
The project targets families that have had diseases or abnormalities since their data will be of more use in finding genetic links. According to Church, older volunteers get priority because they've had more life history and more medical incidents.
You might ask, why Computerworld? Well, there is this:
Eventually, Church said he envisions millions of volunteers participating in the Personal Genome Project, requiring a highly scalable infrastructure. For just the current database with data on 10 people, the project is using 100 servers and a three-node Isilon IQ 12000x cluster.
The success of the project is highly dependent on how well the crowd-sourcing model works and which companies step forward to offer up technology for research. Church said Google has also offered "significant gifts," as has Amazon, which offered to host the data on its cloud storage offering.
I'm not so interested in the medical history part, and much more interested in standard survey-type anthropometrics. I'm beginning to be apprehensive about the kind of computing power one will need just to work with the data. I'm glad I don't have to worry about hosting them.
