What do you do if your child has a condition that is new to science?

For years, sequencing was too expensive for common use—in 2001, the cost of sequencing a single human genome was around a hundred million dollars. But by 2010, with the advent of new technologies, that figure had dropped by more than ninety-nine per cent, to roughly fifty thousand dollars. To reduce costs further, Duke researchers, including geneticists Vandana Shashi and David Goldstein, planned to sequence only the exome—the less than two per cent of the genome that codes for proteins and gives rise to the vast majority of known genetic disorders. In a handful of isolated cases, exome sequencing had been successfully used by doctors desperate to identify the causes of mysterious, life-threatening conditions. If the technique could be shown to be more broadly effective, the Duke team might help usher in a new approach to disease discovery.

Read more from Seth Mnookin in The New Yorker.