Are you going to change the world? (Really?)

If it's your best chance at a big first step, then you're doing the right thing.

I think it is.

Do you need a lot of wealth to do this? Why not start on these goals today?

Yes, you need a lot of wealth to do serious research on your own topics and not have to do what the grant-granters want.

I am changing the world, and sometimes its a distraction from my startup, and sometimes it loops back in to help us out. Its a give and take relationship.

I started a casual think tank in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to discuss problems like these outside of the walls of corporate or government restrictions. We discuss a number of topics from environmental issues, space flight, and artificial intelligence.

Every day there are a core of us that are networking people in Wisconsin, and trying to get them to do amazing things.

There are already people in universities that are able to analyze for years the best way to do something, but what they do not know how to do, i get something to 70% and make a go of it.

Out of our think tank group. We came up with two ideas that have lead into further projects. The first is a company concept for social events that lead me to my discovery of ycombinator, the other is a means to improve the tools for researcher's, specifically in the computational analysis world.

Our company Social Helix, is developing a few small and local customers, and we plan to apply to ycombinator as a way to network in the valley.

The FS3-Obsidian Project targets the advantages of GPUs (Graphics cards) over CPUs and seeks to find ways for local researchers to improve their research productivity. So, if you look at folding@home, they took the GPU rewrote their software to use the GPU instead of the CPU and were able to improve performance by 50x. Originally the folding@home project expected in 20 years to compute all of the shapes that human DNA could take, as part of a goal to simulate an entire human in the computer. If you have explored Stephan's Wolframs book, "A New Kind of Science." Then you can begin to understand how computers will be our primary tool to observe the universe at extremely large and small scales. Computer simulations will give us the ability to enhance our observations at our scale through many layers of information, in much the same way that lenses allowed us to focus and bend light to see the really small or the really large. Telescopes and Microscopes opened up the worlds of astrophysics, and medical science. Computer simulation will allow us to focus clearly on information in much the same way to give us the ability to explore and discover our world in new ways. We will be able to observe all of the inter workings of a human being, and some day, we will be able to simulate the movement and probability of every electron in a single person. Imagine the power of that, imagine the insight of it. We will likewise have the power to do this on the astrophysics scale too, leading to new answers in the formation of galaxies, the passage of time, and the substrate of physical reality.

According to Wolfram, even the systems we see as random, can be simulated from often times simple rules.

It is the Fireseed group's belief that GPUs will be the gateway to simulation based research, and its our goal to find ways to get these tools in the hands of researchers. nVidia, and ATI have theorized that the GPU could be 500x faster than the CPU on simulation based math, and companies like RapidMind are building tools that enable more traditional programming patterns to be used but limit potential performance advantages to between 10x-50x.

A great case study of groups thinking differently about systems through simulation techniques rather than modeling that takes short cuts, are Jeff Hawking's( invented palm script ) project Nuemeta, and another interesting project that goes by the name "Evolved Machines." Jeff's group hopes to change nueral technology through HTM (hierarchical temporal memory systems) modeling the biological structure of nuerons, where evolved machines is simulating on a GPU 4 dimensional neural activity, which incorporates some of the same temporal theories that Jeff's group is exploring.

I would really challenge you to not try to change the world in big ways first, but I have found, just saying "hello" is often times a wonderful way to start an interesting conversation.

I agree that option 3 is a great thing to go, but the problem is that most people won't pay to have these tests done unless their insurance covers it. I doubt an insurance company will pay for it because it costs them more money to have regular screenings done if the individual is at higher risk, or the insurance company could drop coverage all together. It's unfortunate that the US health care system works this way. Also, I doubt people will decide to go get tested for increased risks for diseases unless their doctor recommends it; for most, ignorance is bliss, and they would rather not know. It's illogical, but that seems to be how a lot of people think.

I think it's a good idea to pursue both options 1 and 3; option 1 will allow you to get a steady income to allow you to expand to other more "useful" tests in option 3 and to pay for their FDA approval. Once more tests are developed, a package option could be offered which tested for all mutations, both the "feel good" ones and the increased risk ones.