Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by twic 850 days ago
In the UK it's free if there is some reason to think you may be carrier:

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/genetic-and-genomic-testing/

As the cost of doing it comes down, i would expect it to be offered more widely. I don't know if it will ever be cheap enough to offer to all prospective parents.

Oddly, the cost of doing genetic tests does not scale at all linearly:

https://www.rbht.nhs.uk/sites/nhs/files/Laboratories/CGGL%20...

(eg a single arrhythmia test is £650 - £900, but the whole panel is £1000, and then it's only another £150 to do multiple panels)

Meanwhile, sequencing a whole genome is ~$1000:

https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/DNA-Sequen...

Perhaps a lot of the cost is sample preparation, and the actual molecular genetics bit is dirt cheap.