Besides significantly reducing cancer-related deaths, this process would be relatively inexpensive and easily rolled out across poor and wealthy countries alike. Meaning that just like the mobile phone, low-GDP countries would quickly enjoy healthcare services impossible in the most advanced nations just a few decades earlier. At present our vision of first-class healthcare is giant, expensive technology which can take up a whole room – not unlike the computers of the 1960s and 1970s. But from sequencing the genome of newborns to preventative treatment for cancer, handheld genome sequencers will allow for diagnostics that replace rooms’ worth of equipment. As with communications and energy infrastructures, the growth of cutting-edge healthcare in the Global South will look very diferent to existing infrastructure in places like Europe and the United States. Once more the technologies of the Third Disruption will efectively allow some of the world’s poorest countries to ‘leapfrog’ conventional parameters for development, meaning decades from now relatively poorer countries could have rates of cancer detection more impressive than the wealthiest societies of today. Whether they do, of course, depends on the politics of how the technology is distributed.
If handheld gene sequencers sound outlandish – reminiscent, perhaps, of the ‘tricorder’ in Star Trek – then don’t worry, because they already exist. The \$1,000 MinION sequencer, which fits in the palm of your hand and weighs just ninety grams, can sequence the genome of organisms such as the Ebola virus multiple times and at high speed.<sup>\*</sup> While the technology can’t yet deal with the complexity of an organism such as a human, given prodigious improvements in price performance it is only a question of when such an innovation will appear.
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It’s worth pointing out that the genome of E. coli wasn’t sequenced until 1997, which represented the cutting edge of biotechnology at the time.