caroline chen joins us now from san francisco. ailed reporting, but the question is, why no? -- why now? why is this developing now? why is this taking off at this point? e: exactly, carolin when the first human genome was processed in the human genome tookss -- project, it $13.5 billion to do. now the cost has fallen and it $1000rting to get towards per person, and that means you can start seeing a large numbers of people and a across large numbers of databases and seeing trends and see what kind of conditions there are and look for outliers and for people who have are extreme and have really extreme mutations. scarlet: what is the most valuable part of this process? is there a database of people with these genetic mutations? having a database is truly valuable to drug companies now because you can really search for ties between what your genes are doing and what your body and how your body is behaving. the medical did community come to realize the potential power of these mutations, such as excessive toilient to -- brazilians pai

it is one of the features in this week's "bloomberg business week," and author caroline chen joins usrom san francisco. caroline, what are these trying to tell us -- discoveries trying to tell us? mutations wese are don't normally see in humans, and so when they find these things, they can learn more about how the body works and learn more about how to make new drugs. scarlet: what does this say about outlanders -- outliers? caroline: one of the people that i interviewed was stephen, he does not feel pain. he has a genetic mutation that causes him not to feel pain. people like stephen, researchers now understand a new pathway in the body and they are trying to drug it to create a new painkiller. alix: how much money are companies putting into this research? caroline: they are putting a lot of money into this research and databasesting large to get a hold of a lot of information. one company paid $450 million to buy one small, icelandic company. they are trying to get a hold of all this it genetic information so they can look for trends or patterns in how your genes influence your body