Oh, that is really cool. From the FAQ:<p>>Candidate teams are limited to five members. They must be genomic researchers, entrepreneurs, startups, or early-stage companies from academia or industry that aim to take their promising NGS applications to market.<p>If I were starting a company in the genomics space (maybe someday), I would definitely apply with Illumina. They recently hit a milestone whereby a complete human genome can be sequenced for $1000 [1], which has been a goal for over a decade since it "neatly highlights the chasm between the actual cost of the Human Genome Project, estimated at $2.7 billion over a decade, and the benchmark for routine, affordable personal genome sequencing" [2].<p>This will be one of the more exciting, and yet at the same time terrifying, areas of research and innovation. Personalized medicine is the future of healthcare, but we'll need brilliant, well-intentioned people to lead us there in a way that benefits us while avoiding the numerous ethical challenges along the way.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.illumina.com/systems/hiseq-x-sequencing-system.ilmn" rel="nofollow">http://www.illumina.com/systems/hiseq-x-sequencing-system.il...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$1,000_genome" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$1,000_genome</a>