It has already delivered ever cheaper and more powerful computers. Now Moore’s Law—the prediction four decades ago by Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, that computer chips would roughly double in performance every 18 months or so—is promising to turbo-charge our health care as well.

The “genome chip”—a matchbox-sized micro-array, fabricated on a slither of silicon or quartz, that can detect 1m or more specific genetic variations in an individual’s DNA at a time—is following an even steeper price-performance curve than Mr Moore ever imagined. More...