Nobel efforts: Sequencing human genomes is getting cheaper

10/4/22 8:00PM

Nobel efforts‍

‍Svante Pääbo, a Swedish scientist, has won the Nobel Prize for his reconstruction of a full genome for Neanderthals and other extinct hominins. Pääbo's prize, officially the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, carried a 10m Swedish Kronor prize (~$920k USD) and was the first of six awards that are being announced this week. The impressive work, which saw Pääbo pioneer methods to extract and analyze DNA from Neanderthal bones, is experimentation that will hopefully get easier over time, as the cost of genome sequencing continues to fall.

Indeed, Illumina — a company which has some 80% share of the global gene sequencing market — unveiled two new sequencing instruments this week. The company claims these tools will bring the cost of sequencing a full genome to less than $240 and give the company capacity to sequence ~20,000 genomes a year, up from 7,500. Tell those numbers to a scientist from the year 2000, when one human genome sequence would cost close to $100m, and they'd likely laugh you out of the lab.

‍The whole gene

‍What about that at-home DNA test kit you bought online? That only takes a snippet, usually around 0.02% of your DNA, using clues to predict your disease risks and ancestry.

Whole-genome sequencing, on the other hand, provides 4,000 times more data on your DNA than at-home tests, and is likely to lend a hand in major medical breakthroughs. The process helped the speedy creation of vaccines for Covid-19, can help the early detection of disease outbreaks, identify inherited disorders and even characterize genetic cell mutations in cancer patients.

Chris Stokel-Walker

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5