On February 6, 2007, executives from 454 Life Sciences showed 78-year-old James Watson a first draft of his own genome. There was something downright poetic about this. Watson, of course, had won a Nobel Prize 45 years earlier for his role in discovering the double-helical structure of DNA; he was also a prime mover behind the Human Genome Project, which by its completion in 2003 had spent nearly $3 billion over 13 years extracting the blueprint that those helices encode. Now 454 had moved a step beyond that megaproject, which pooled many people's DNA to determine the genetic sequence of what amounts to a model human. The company and its so-called next-generation sequencing machine had single-­handedly read the genetic code of an individual--one whose work had done so much to make the achievement possible.

But Jonathan Rothberg, who founded 454 in Branford, CT, with the dream of producing a sequencing machine more efficient than those available to the Human Genome Project, does not mention poetry when he recounts his meeting with Watson. Rather, he talks about money, speed, and a future in which ordinary people carry around their personal genomes on discs--an increasingly plausible scenario. "It cost us $200,000 to do Jim Watson," points out Rothberg. "And we did it mostly in December and January."