Any deadly viruses to declare?

Today, a company called Ion Torrent announced they were going to start selling a DNA-sequencing machine that can sequence an entire human genome for $1,000. It's just the latest milestone in the long-term crash in the cost of gene-reading. There are lots of benefits that will flow from this ongoing transformation. For one thing, as I wrote in 2010 in the New York Times, it's getting easier to identify new viruses that could turn to be the next HIV or SARS.

To research my story, I paid a visit to the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University. On the day I dropped by, Ian Lipkin and his colleagues were very busy:

Some researchers were examining New York flu, others African colds. The blood of patients with mysterious, nameless fevers was waiting to be analyzed. There was dried African bush meat seized by customs inspectors at Kennedy Airport. Horse viruses, clam viruses: all told, members of Dr. Lipkin's team were working on 139 different virus projects. It was, in other words, a fairly typical day.

Some of the research that was going on that day–specifically, the ...