The world's first genetic mapping of an Asian - a healthy Han Chinese man - was completed in a Shenzhen laboratory, a research team announced on Thursday.
From now, at a cost of 5 million to 6 million yuan, anyone who wants to have their whole genome sequence tested can get it within a month, Wang Jun, chief scientist of the programme, said yesterday.
With the genetic map, diseases such as breast cancer can be predicted with high accuracy and treated before they occur, Professor Wang said. This is the third individual genome sequence in the world, but 10 times more precise than previous ones, which were invariably from whites.
The project, called the First Asian Diploid Genome - undertaken by the Beijing Genomics Institute's Shenzhen branch, the National Engineering Research Centre of Systematic Bioinformatics and the Beijing Institute of Genomics - planned to conduct tests on 100 more individuals in the next few years.
'Our next step is to persuade a hundred more open-minded people, preferably famous and influential, to take the test,' Professor Wang said.
'The goal is to reach a thousand.'