I was at TEDMED in San Diego last week listening to Stanford physician and entrepreneur Daniel Kraft run through a dizzying array of medical devices, apps, discoveries. They do everything from nano-repairing cells to regenerating damaged tissue in our brains.

Eythor Bender of Berkeley Bionics also talked about exoskeleton technology that is allowing the paralyzed to walk. Catherine Mohr of Intuitive Surgical, Inc. described surgical robots that precisely excise very small tumors.

As Peter Diamandis of the X-Prize said on stage, "we are entering a period of explosive innovation."

It's a nascent world of miracles large and small that will be nice when - and if - it happens.

Counterpoised with this brilliant world was a talk the night when TEDMED opened by economist and entrepreneur Juan Enriquez. The world he described - the real world of today's overpriced, dysfunctional healthcare system - was a dystopic counterpoint to Kraft's bright and shiny world.

"Our system is operating as an anti-Moore's Law," said Enriquez, meaning that innovation in the real world of biomedicine is actually declining. Investments in drugs are in decline as the costs and timelines for developing new meds increases and the number of approved drugs goes down.

Enriquez described cases where drugs were delayed for years by regulatory hurdles, and by an academic environment that is hugely risk adverse. One example: he said a seven year delay in approving beta-blockers resulted in 119,000 deaths of patients that would have benefited from these drugs. And Interleukin-2 was okayed as a treatment for kidney cancer in nine European countries, he noted, but the FDA took 3 1/2 years to grant its approval.

Next year the new owner of TEDMED, Jay Walker, plans to move the meeting to Washington, DC, in part to see if the energy and buzz of excitement over innovation that one often hears about on the west coast can penetrate the dystopia Enriquez described.

Earlier this year, I had breakfast with George Church, professor of genetics and director of the Center for Computational Genetics at Harvard Medical School. (Click here to read my profile of Church in the New York Times.)

A pioneer in developing DNA sequencing technologies, and in researching everything from epigenetics and microbiomics to synthetic biology, Church has co-founded or advises over 20 companies. He also has launched the Personal Genome Project with a goal of sequencing the complete genomes of 100,000 volunteers.

When I asked Church what he was most excited about right now, he answered without hesitation: "I'm thinking a lot about using regeneration as the key to treatments and keeping people healthy."

TR: You mean regeneration using stem cells?

Church: Yes, induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cells (see, "Growing Heart Cells Just for You"). This is where I'm putting almost all of my chips these days, because it combines many of my interests--genomics, sequencing, epigenetics, synthetic biology, stem cells. I don't think people have fully appreciated how quickly adult stem cells and sequencing and synthetic biology have progressed. They have progressed by orders of magnitude since we got IPS. Before that, they basically weren't working.

Is this because IPS cells are relatively easy to create and to engineer?

You can use them to reprogram genomes--not sequence them, but to reprogram them genetically and epigenetically. In other words you make the minimum changes it takes to get them where you want them to be genetically and epigenetically and then you program the cells into tissues.

What do you mean?

Let's use stem cells in bone marrow as an example. They are easy to use and to get to work when you implant them in bone marrow. You might one day have three choices. You can have bone marrow from someone else that is matched to you, or that is from you, or bone marrow that is matched to you and comes to you, but is better than you. This better bone marrow might be [engineered to be] resistant to one virus, or to all viruses. It could have a bunch of alleles that you picked out of super centenarians, alleles that you have reason to believe are at least harmless and possibly helpful. So now you have choice, a patient who can take a good bone marrow that he might reject and you'll be on immunosuppressants your whole life. Or you might use your own, or your own that might fix the cancer, or your own enhanced bone marrow. And you will be able to do that for almost every stem cell population. Some of them are a little bit harder to replace, though.

Does IPS really work to accomplish this regeneration?

We have good evidence that you can create an entire mouse from IPS cells.

Has this been done?

This has been done. They have used IPS cells to grow a mouse, and they made IPS cells from that mouse. They're totipotent [able to make an entire organism], not merely pluripotent. We haven't done this for humans for obvious ethical reasons, but we will do it. As far as I know the mice have done fine.

But haven't there been some problems with mutations occurring with IPS-generated tissue?

We have a recent paper in Nature that shows that when you make human induced pluripotent stem cells you actually do get mutations in coding regions at a slightly elevated level. But I think this is temporary. We're going to use this information as an assay to make the process work better, to correct problems. You will be able to use this to improve the quality of gene therapy because that's been the problem with gene therapy the last ten years.

How far are we from testing that in humans?

Almost everything I've described has been done in rodents, so we're talking about years, not decades. It's shorter than the Human Genome Project [which took 13 years], not less expensive, but definitely shorter.

Could this technology be used to support personalized genomics, and can it verify a personal risk factor?

That's why we do IPS. We want to establish an IPS line for every single person who gets sequenced in the PGP [Personalized Genome Project, which aims to sequence 100,000 people].

When is regeneration likely to happen in humans?

There is much to be worked out. But here's the leap. If you want to accelerate this, you have to pick an intermediate target that doesn't sound so scary. So you'll start out with bone marrow patients. And you're going to basically make a synthetic version of that patient's bone marrow using IPS, which is going to work much better than the diseased bone marrow. And once this works that's going to catch on like wildfire. And then you'll do skin, and then you'll do every other stem cell you can get.

Who is going to do this?

The only way people are going to get this is through some brave soul. It will start with a sick person, and they will end up getting well, possibly more well than before they got sick. So you didn't just correct the sickness, you actually did more. And they'll give testimonials, and someone from the New York Times will interview them, and tell this appealing anecdote.

Will people who are, say, aging but not yet sick ever be able to use this technology?

I don't consider this medicine, it's preventive. I expect somebody who is truly brave, who has nothing wrong with them other than maybe the usual aging, saying: 'I want a bone marrow transplant', or intestinal, or whatever. And it will gain momentum from there.

Won't this cost a lot?

Initially it will be wealthy people who will try this. Ironically, wealthy people are often willing to be the guinea pigs that are really in a sense the front line of new technologies. They're the foot soldiers. They're willing to put themselves at risk, and to spend money on it.

A few weeks back I received my complete genome by e-mail.

Actually, the e-mail provided a link to my raw data, a 690 MB file, a tad too large to send in totem by e-mail.

What I got was endless lines of nucleotides— As, Ts, Cs and Gs—divided up by chromosome in a report prepared by the California-based sequencing company Complete Genomics. They generously ran my genome for free—after considerable cajoling by me—so that I could report on the experience. (The dramatic decrease in price for sequencing whole genomes, from perhaps a million dollars three years ago to about $5,000 today, helped persuade them). The project also was championed by Harvard geneticist George Church and his Personal Genome Project (PGP), which has posted my results and given me the designation PGP 13. I am the 13^th person to be sequenced for the project, which is aiming to collect 100,000 genomes. (Other PGPers include tech guru Esther Dyson, Harvard psychologist and author Steven Pinker, and Church).

The mass of code delivered to me holds clues about whether I'm at a higher risk than most people for everything from heart attack and certain cancers to Alzheimer's disease and, more controversially, depression and other behavioral conditions. It contains tips about drugs that may not work for me, or that might inflict dangerous side effects. (Check out my book, Experimental Man, for details about some of these findings from previous testing).

One day, this data will be used in tandem with the stem cell line created for me by Cellular Dynamics International (See my feature article: "Growing Heart Cells Just for Me"). These stem cells—created by bioengineering cells from my blood, which I sent to the company—are similar to those cells that appear a few days after a human egg is fertilized. They can grow into any cell in the body, including the heart, brain, and liver. These cells, guided by the clues in my genome, could be used to refine predictions or diagnoses for diseases,or one day could be used to provide replacement cells should I get whacked in the head or have a heart attack.

But what have I learned from my complete genome that I didn't already know?

If you have been following the Experimental Man Project, you know that I already have results for thousands of genetic markers (genotypes) associated with disease, and with traits that run the gamut from predicting that I have blue eyes (easy to verify) to a higher than normal risk for becoming a heroin addict (I've never actually been interested in the Big H).

These genotypes came from numerous tests, labs, and companies that include the likes of 23andme, Navigenics, Illumina, Affymetrix, the Coriell Institute's Personalized Medicine Collaborative, and Quest Diagnostics. Their tests, however, identified perhaps 2 million genetic markers out of the billions in each of my cells. These were targeted to be among the short list of markers inside a human that seem to be most important in influencing disease and other traits, yet they missed significant portions of my genome that have now been captured by the Complete sequence.

As whole genomes become less expensive and more common, with hundreds of them now sequenced, scientists are discovering that subtle and often rare differences among people may be linked to even common diseases such as heart disease and diabetes. This may explain why many of the genetic markers identified by geneticists for common diseases seem to have a surprising small impact on whether a person actually gets cancer or diabetes, suggesting that as yet unidentified genes and other factors are at work that have not been discovered.

I'm just beginning to sift through my data from Complete Genomics, but I already have discovered one big difference from my previous testing. This is a near doubling of my total genotypes identified (referred to as "annotated"), from around 11,000 before to over 21,000 now. This analysis comes from SNPedia, a wiki-style website that devotes a page each to describe thousands of individual genetic markers. The site's founder and curator, Michael Cariaso, has developed a program called Promethease that anyone with DNA data can use to create a list of genotypes drawn from SNPedia's individual pages.

As of this writing, my total "genotypes annotated" equals 21,621—a number that will go up as more genotypes are identified in the scientific literature.

Here is how SNPedia's Michael Cariaso described my results in an e-mail:

SNPedia is now watching over 100 genomes closely. Your genome now has the most detailed report known. This is due to the combined effects of your Complete Genomics full genome and your microarrays [previous tests], putting your combined at ~22k. With your recent arrival I think you're likely to hold the lead for the rest of this year, and perhaps well beyond.

Two important challenges arise as I begin to analyze my data. One is that tools for interpreting whole genomes remain nascent as companies and labs that have been hell bent on building better and cheaper methods for sequencing begin to turn to the much more Herculean task of understanding what all of this code means. The other is that much of the genetic markers remain preliminary, based on statistical analyses that compare people, say, with heart disease to those who don't have heart disease. Only a tiny percentage of these "Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS)" have been clinically validated in real people to see if the risk factors indicated by the statisticians actually happen. (GWAS is also becoming a misnomer and needs updating, since these markers don't really come from whole genomes).

This second challenge requires a massive effort akin to the Human Genome Project to systematically validate the tens of thousands of genotypes that have been identified so far by scientists. This task will be greatly aided by the proliferation of whole genomes as the price comes down.

In the end, though, the real question is: has this crush of data changed my life? For that, I'll need to post another blog-or several. So stay tuned.

This is an appeal: Send me you ideas for how best to interpret my newly sequenced complete genome!