1) the glowing plant project isn't doing that great. There have been scant technical updates to their blog, despite the promises of their founders, and they've quietly pushed the delivery date from April to July.<p>2) the ability to print large quantities of DNA for a given patient is not really going to be necessary. For the most part any "biologic" drug that might need to be personalized is most likely going to be 99% common "boilerplate" plus 1% or less "personalization". For example, antibodies, which have a massive common region plus a small amount of variable region that is an 'adapter' to whatever you're going to use the antibody for. We are well, well within the ability to synthesize this amount of DNA at an affordable cost, and have been for a while. Not to mention that you'll still be giving 'the same drug' to more than one person, that's because human variation is not that high (especially everywhere except for africa due to population bottlenecks in human migration).<p>3) The point about the netflix model is an interesting one.
One of the things worth pointing out is that biological effects are hilariously noisy. Even many of our best genetic correlates aren't that clear cut. A lot of what we know still relies on large sample sizes to help cut through real confounding factors. And if that's what it takes to detect causal genetic effects, then we'll have to understand whatever we do to 'fix' these (whatever approach we take) will have to deal with the same type of issues.<p>In other words, personalized medicine isn't going to be this amazing thing that will let us conquer all our illnesses. It will be a tool that will bring significant improvements, possibly even order of magnitude improvements to those with the right genes or illnesses, but it's not magic.
Computer simulations of living cells? We've got a <i>long</i> way to go before we get to that point.<p>The current techniques we have to model <i>single molecules</i> in natural environments (solutions) isn't that great right now. Modeling a cell is several magnitudes more difficult.