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[00:00.17] People were aghast.

[00:03.09] They thought we were going to do terrible medical things to these children.

[00:08.40] They thought there was going to be catastrophic psychological distress, and they thought we were going to spend all sorts of money.

[00:14.51] So we've spent ten years exquisitely studying the medical, behavioral and economic impact of newborn genetic sequencing.

[00:23.27] And we don't have all the answers yet, but I have to tell you that what we've discovered so far is pretty reassuring.

[00:30.44] Now, what was really surprising about this was what we found in these normal babies.

[00:38.15] If you take, let's say, 400 genes which represent conditions that are treatable today, absolutely treatable, in about 1,000 families, we found mutations in those genes in about four percent of these babies. Four percent.

[00:54.35] And if you expanded that gene list to be, let's say, 5,000 genes long, and that includes conditions that aren't treatable yet, conditions that maybe attack you in adulthood, we found an incredible 12 percent of these babies were carrying such mutations.

[01:11.09] Now, remember, that doesn't mean that all of these children are going to get the disease.

[01:16.13] But it does mean that if you know the risk that the children have, then your pediatrician and your family can be on the lookout for vague symptoms that would otherwise be overlooked.

[01:27.82] This isn't a small problem.

[01:29.68] If this holds, that means in the United States, there are over 400,000 babies a year that will carry these risk mutations, and worldwide, that's over 15 million babies a year that will carry these risk mutations.

[01:43.76] It's kind of ironic, isn't it, because these are individually rare diseases, many of them you won't even have heard of, but together they are a massive medical problem.