When you get screened
Screening guidelines are written for the average person. That is a reasonable place to start and it is not a plan for you specifically. The most useful thing a genome usually does is move a date — the same test, years earlier.
Clinical whole genome sequencing · $599
Your genome is 6.4 billion letters long. Almost nobody has read theirs.
Clinical whole genome sequencing in a CLIA-certified laboratory. $599, one time.
Order for $599One time. No subscription. Results in six to eight weeks.
All 6.4 billion base pairs~30× average coveragePhysician-ready reportLifetime access to your data
FREE GUIDE · PDF
7 Reasons You Can’t Afford Not to Sequence Your Genome
Read the complete guide, including the science and references behind every reason.
In one sentence
Whole genome sequencing reads your DNA. All of it.
Your DNA is 6.4 billion letters long. Most DNA tests read a small selection of those letters, chosen in advance. Whole genome sequencing reads every one, coding and non-coding, in a clinical laboratory, and a person with clinical training reviews the result.
You collect the sample at home, from saliva. You do it once. Your DNA does not change, so the answer does not expire.
What you are actually buying
A book, 6.4 billion letters long, and you were handed two copies at birth.
One copy came from your mother, one from your father. Every cell in your body carries a set. That is why the number is 6.4 billion and not 3.2 billion, and it turns out to matter a great deal, for a reason we will come back to.
The sample is collected at home, from saliva, in a kit posted to your door. What separates this from a chip-based test is not how the sample is taken. It is how much of the genome gets read afterwards, and who reads the result.
Do I need this?
Four ways to know whether this is for you.
The leading threats to a long life — cardiovascular disease, cancer, dementia, diabetes — rarely arrive suddenly. They develop quietly, often for decades, and the annual physical is built to catch what has already become obvious.
You feel fine
Your blood tests look normal. Your family history looks reassuring. That is the condition this addresses, not a reason to skip it.
There is a family history nobody ever explained
Someone died young and no one could say why, or testing came back negative and explained nothing. A genome can tell you whether the specific thing you have been watching for is written into you. It cannot tell you to stop paying attention, and a low genetic risk is never a reason to skip a screening your doctor has recommended.
You are about to make a medical decision
Starting a statin. Considering a GLP-1. Deciding when screening should begin. How your body handles more than two hundred medications is written into your DNA.
And who this is not for
If you want a picture of what your body is doing today, that is blood work, and you repeat it two or three times a year because those numbers move. Your genome does not change, so you read it once. Many people do both.
Order for $599
At-home saliva kit. Sequenced in a CLIA-certified clinical laboratory.
Then what?
Four things a result actually changes.
This is the question the category never answers. A report is not the product. What the report changes is the product.
Which medication is likely to work
Pharmacogenomics is the most immediately actionable section of the report and the least talked about. If you are about to start a medication, this is information your physician can use this month.
What your family should ask
Your genome is not only about you. Each child has a fifty per cent chance of carrying an inherited variant, and siblings and parents share the same book. One result frequently changes a family's questions, not just one person's.
What you can stop guessing about
If you have carried an unexplained family history for years, a genome can tell you whether the specific thing you have been watching for is written into you. Often it is not, and that is a real answer.
A low genetic risk is never a reason to skip a screening your doctor has recommended.
We want to be careful about that sentence, because it is the one place where getting the wording wrong could cause real harm. A reassuring genetic result narrows what to watch for. It does not rule out disease, and it is not permission to stop paying attention.
How it's different
How much of your DNA does each test read?
These all get called a DNA test. They read very different amounts, because each one was built to answer a different question.
The testHow much of your DNA it reads
Blood panelsWhat your body is doing todayNot a DNA test
DNA chip testsAncestry, traits, and a set of specific health markers<0.1%
Gene panelsA short list of genes, chosen in advance~0.3%
Exome sequencingThe part that codes for proteins~1.8%
Whole genome sequencingEverything you were born with~100%
Percentages refer to the approximate proportion of the genome sequenced or analysed genetically. Blood panels measure circulating biological markers rather than genomic DNA — a genuinely useful thing, and a different one.
What $599 includes
The report is not the book. It is what we found in it.
- Your complete genome sequenceAll 6.4 billion base pairs, at approximately 30× average coverage.
- A cardiovascular risk scoreInherited cardiac risk, readable long before anything moves on a cholesterol panel.
- A cancer risk assessmentCovering BRCA1 and BRCA2 among others, and what they mean for when screening should begin.
- A medication report (pharmacogenomics)How your body handles more than two hundred common medications — which most people currently discover by trial and error.
- Longevity and metabolic traitsInherited factors in how your body handles weight, sugar and metabolism.
- A physician-ready PDFWritten to be handed to your doctor and used, not filed away.
- Lifetime access to your dataSequenced once. It is yours, and it does not expire.
- One year of the Human Longevity AI appAsk questions of your own genome in plain language, and get an answer drawn from your own data.
$599, one time. No subscription. An at-home saliva kit, sequenced in a CLIA-certified clinical laboratory. Sequencing takes six to eight weeks.
Why the answer can be trusted
A machine cannot read your DNA like a book. It has to shred it first.
Millions of tiny fragments, a few letters on each. A computer works out where each one belongs by matching the overlaps, and rebuilds the book.
Shred one copy and you get gaps, and no way to tell a real difference from a smudge. So we do not shred one copy. We shred about thirty. Every position ends up covered by around thirty fragments, and when they agree, that is the answer.
Here is why that matters for your health, and it comes back to the two copies. Most serious inherited variants are written into only one of your two copies. So only about half the fragments covering that spot will show it. Read it twice and you could miss it entirely.
That is what clinical-grade depth is for. Not speed. Certainty.
And half of it is software
Reading a genome is only half chemistry. Turning fragments into you carry this variant, and here is what it means takes an entire interpretation pipeline, and then a person with clinical training who reviews the output. A CLIA-certified laboratory has to validate that whole process and demonstrate that it performs — not simply run the chemistry cleanly. Human Longevity is CLIA certified for whole genome sequencing.
Always approximately 30× average coverage. Coverage is an average across the genome, not a guarantee for every individual position, and the difference is exactly the sort of thing worth being precise about.
The part nobody can copy
Sequenced once. Read for life.
Any clinical laboratory can sequence a whole genome. What cannot easily be matched is time. Your genome does not change — but what can be read in it changes constantly, and a sequence you already own gets re-read as the science moves.
This is not a marketing promise. It is a documented feature of the field. In 2006, researchers studying a gene called PCSK9 found that people carrying certain variants had markedly low cholesterol and far less coronary heart disease; that observation became a class of cholesterol medicines prescribed today (Cohen JC et al., New England Journal of Medicine, 2006 · PMID 16554528). Variants are formally reclassified as evidence accumulates (Mersch J et al., JAMA, 2018 · PMID 30264118), and re-reading stored sequence data yields new findings (Wenger AM et al., Genetics in Medicine, 2017 · PMID 27441994).
Human Longevity has published in this exact area — Identification of misclassified ClinVar variants via disease population prevalence, listed below. The company does reclassification work itself, which is what makes "we read it again" a claim rather than a slogan.
Blood work you repeat two or three times a year, because those numbers move. That is what makes blood work useful. Your genome is the other kind of test.
Order for $599
One time. Your data is yours for life.
The published record
Who are we, and why would we know?
Human Longevity was founded in 2013 by Dr. J. Craig Venter, who led the private effort to sequence the human genome. Thirty peer-reviewed papers carry both the Human Longevity affiliation and Venter as an author, across journals including PNAS, Science and Nature Genetics. The company has built a longitudinal health dataset covering more than ten thousand individuals over a ten-year period. Eight papers from the company's published record are listed here, each verifiable by PubMed ID.
| Year | Paper | Journal | PMID |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Precision medicine integrating whole-genome sequencing, comprehensive metabolomics, and advanced imaging Hou Y-C, et al. | PNAS 117(6) | 31980526 |
| 2019 | Profound perturbation of the metabolome in obesity is associated with health risk Cirulli ET, et al. | Cell Metabolism 29(2) | 30318341 |
| 2018 | Identification of misclassified ClinVar variants via disease population prevalence Shah N, et al. | Am J Human Genetics 102(4) | 29625023 |
| 2018 | Prospective study of cancer genetic variants: variation in rate of reclassification by ancestry Slavin TP, et al. | JNCI 110(10) | 29618041 |
| 2018 | Paternally inherited cis-regulatory structural variants are associated with autism Brandler WM, et al. | Science 360(6386) | 29674594 |
| 2018 | The human noncoding genome defined by genetic diversity di Iulio J, et al. | Nature Genetics 50(3) | 29483654 |
| 2017 | Identification of individuals by trait prediction using whole-genome sequencing data Lippert C, et al. | PNAS 114(38) | 28874526 |
| 2016 | Deep sequencing of 10,000 human genomes Telenti A, et al. | PNAS 113(42) | 27702888 |
"This study shows that the definition of 'healthy' may not be what we think it is."
J. Craig Venter, PhD, on the 1,190-participant PNAS study
What it cannot do
The pages we cannot read yet.
We would rather you heard this from us than found it out afterwards.
Your genome cannot tell you when you will die. It cannot promise you anything, and nothing here is a guarantee about your health. Some of what we find comes back as a variant of uncertain significance — we found a sentence, we can read the words, and the field does not yet know what it means. That is a real category, not a dodge, and you will see it in your report.
Risk is a likelihood. It is not a verdict. Anyone offering you certainty about your health is offering you something else.
And one more, because it is the honest limit of the science rather than of this company: polygenic risk models were built largely on data from people of European ancestry and are less accurate for other backgrounds. Human Longevity's own scientists say so in print.
We would still do it. The part that is well understood is where the answers you can act on live, and it gets larger every year.
Questions people ask before ordering
Answers, plainly.
How is this different from the DNA kit I already did?
Most at-home DNA tests use a chip, which reads a few hundred thousand positions chosen in advance — less than a tenth of one per cent of your genome. That covers ancestry, traits and a set of specific health markers, and it does that well. Some tiers sequence the exome, which is roughly one to two per cent of the genome. Whole genome sequencing reads all of it, in a clinical laboratory, with a clinician reviewing the result.
Why not just run a hundred blood tests instead?
You should run blood tests. They tell you what is happening in your body right now, and you repeat them two or three times a year because those numbers change — that is the point of them. A blood panel is not a genetic test. Your genome does not change, so you read it once. Do both. They answer different questions.
How is the sample collected?
An at-home saliva kit, posted to you. You return it in the packaging provided. Sequencing takes six to eight weeks.
Is the laboratory accredited?
Human Longevity is CLIA certified for whole genome sequencing. CLIA is the United States federal standard for clinical laboratories — the same standard that applies to the laboratory your hospital sends bloodwork to. No claim of FDA approval or clearance is made for this product.
What happens to my data?
You retain lifetime access to your own sequence. Our data policy sets out how your information is stored and who can access it. Read the data policy.
What do I do with the report?
It is written to be taken to your physician, and it comes as a physician-ready PDF for exactly that reason. The Human Longevity app lets you ask questions of your own genome in plain language so that you arrive at that conversation with better questions. The app helps you understand your own report. It does not replace your doctor, and we would never want it used that way.
Is $599 the whole price?
Yes. One time, no subscription, and that includes the sequencing, the full report, lifetime access to your data and a year of the app. Your genome does not change, so this is not a test you buy again next year.
It has been there the whole time.
Read it once, and have the answer for the rest of your life.
Order for $599One time · At-home saliva kit · CLIA-certified laboratory · Six to eight weeks