Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamandis

The time limit of a prize competition serves as another liberating constraint. In the pressure cooker of a race, with an ever-looming deadline, teams must quickly come to terms with the fact that “the same old way” won’t work. So they’re forced to try something new, pick a path, right or wrong, and see what happens. Most teams fail, but with dozens or hundreds competing, does it really matter? If one team succeeds, within the constraints, they’ve created a true breakthrough. Having a clear, bold target for the competition is the next important restriction. After Venter sequenced the human genome, many companies started selling whole genome-sequencing services. But none of their products had sufficient fidelity to be medically relevant. So the Archon Genomic X PRIZE was created. It challenges teams to sequence one hundred human genomes accurately (one error in one million base pairs), completely (98 percent of the human genome), rapidly (within ten days) and cheaply (and a cost of less than $1,000 per genome)—a quadruple combination that’s a 365 millionfold price-time-performance improvement over Venter’s original 2001 work. Moreover, as the genomes to be sequenced belong to a hundred healthy centenarians, this competition’s results will further unlock the secrets of longevity and drive us to our goal of health care abundance.