Right now, we know less than 1 per cent of the genome in terms of how to really interpret it.

Not everyone is convinced that HLI’s testing will translate into improved health. The most analytical article on the subject, which came in the wake of a Twitter tiff between US journalist Carl Zimmer and Venter, appeared on US health and medicine website STAT. In it, Rita Redberg, a cardiologist at the University of California, San Francisco and Editor-in-Chief of JAMA Internal Medicine, said there was “absolutely no evidence that any of those tests have any benefit for healthy people”.

Venter counters, albeit anecdotally: the MRI of an otherwise healthy man in his early 50s found that he had a thymoma under his breastbone, which was subsequently removed before it spread; another patient was found to harbour a grapefruit-sized ovarian cyst, which can lead to serious complications. At the HLI launch party, a doctor told how his voyage discovered he had ‘aortic insufficiency’ and a cyst. “These are just a few examples of what we are finding,” says Venter.

Much of the resistance to testing stems from concerns about finding ‘incidentalomas’, abnormal growths that may never cause disease, he says. But that, he argues, is a legacy of old-fashioned computed tomography (CT) scans, which use X-rays. Modern MRI scans provide more detailed insights into soft tissues and can distinguish different types of tumour. The real point, says Venter, is that actuarial arguments about efficient screening campaigns are cold comfort for those unfortunate enough to develop serious diseases early in life.

He cites statistics from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, which show that males between 50 and 74 face a 30 per cent chance of dying during that period: around one-third of that risk is down to cancer, and a similar fraction to heart disease. Picking up the cancers and heart disease before serious symptoms develop could have a big impact, he argues.

Studies (yet to be published) of HLI’s patients so far are consistent with these numbers. “We are finding serious medical issues in about a third of people going to the Health Nucleus,” he says. “Every one of them has come in thinking they’re just getting an executive physical, not thinking that they have anything wrong with them. We already have our first letter thanking us for saving somebody’s life.”

Others are concerned that there’s no point in getting advance warning of an untreatable disease, such as Alzheimer’s. “I disagree,” counters Venter. He is optimistic, given the genetic evidence and preliminary evidence from clinical trials, that strategies to prevent Alzheimer’s are likely to emerge, so it is “extremely valuable” to have advanced warning. “Treating late-stage Alzheimer’s is like treating late-stage cancer: it is virtually impossible and you are not going to have some magic drug that grows back 30 per cent of your brain.”

“We will be developing the evidence around this to make the case for preventive medicine,” adds Venter. HLI has more work to do, such as organise a randomised controlled trial to compare the outcomes of people who get the tests with those who do not.

Venter says that the criticisms stem from the conservative nature of the medical community, notably when it comes to keeping the costs of screening under control. “That is the medical establishment saying: we want to keep doing what we do, we want to see people after they develop symptoms and have something wrong with them. The ‘human longevity approach’ is the exact opposite.”

There are also concerns that echo those raised during the genome race about access to his data. Nicole Soranzo of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute near Cambridge, UK, regards HLI’s initiative as “very ambitious and exciting… I am very biased obviously as this project is broadly similar in aim to what we plan to do.” Her concern is whether HLI will make its data publicly accessible to all scientists. This data would be hugely invaluable but if proprietary, she says, “this would be a great shame”.

Venter says he is more concerned about patient anonymity. As an illustration of this, he beckons me over to a computer. HLI has assembled a team of machine-learning experts in Silicon Valley, led by Franz Och, the creator of Google Translate, to use all their data to predict health risks and traits. (This approach is not without its critics. Peter Coveney at University College London, who worked on an effort to create a computer model of the body, says that current medicine lacks enough ‘big understanding’ to make these methods effective. Such strategies work best when guided by theory – in this case, insights into the mechanisms of disease. Without theory to explain correlations, there will be false positives everywhere. “The more variables in play, the bigger the problem you have to map out all the correlations,” he says.)

HLI is now trying to predict facial features from genomes. One thousand volunteers have had their faces mapped in three dimensions, their voices recorded and genomes read. The company is also trying to predict what people look and sound like from their genes.

I peer at the prototype face generator in action, contrasting the patient’s face scan with the prediction. My verdict: not bad. In fact, it’s impressive when compared with the police photofits of yesteryear. Perhaps, one day, parents will be able to predict what their child will look like as an adult from fetal DNA circulating in its mother’s bloodstream.

“The point,” says Venter, “is that if we can predict your photograph and your voice from your genetic code, maybe the other things we are predicting about your risk for disease or other traits you’ll take much more seriously. At the same time, we want to be pretty careful with this,” he warns. “It is a powerful algorithm. [From a genome] we think we can identify that person.” Because genome data can be linked to a person’s identity, it has to be kept highly confidential and cannot be released online, he argues.

How to share insights without sharing genomes has featured in his discussions with Genomics England, an effort backed by the UK government to transform the NHS and bridge the gap between research and treatment by sequencing 100,000 genomes (it has done around 6,000 so far). Like HLI, Genomics England will charge industry to look at its data. “We think our [HLI] database will have extreme value and we will give broad access through subscription,” says Venter, who has also bought Cypher Genomics, a San Diego-based company selected by Genomics England to help interpret the genome.

We already know, based on a project that used Venter’s own genome, that it is possible to identify a supposedly anonymous genome by triangulating it with the help of a consumer genealogy database, public records and so on. Anyone who thinks they can ‘de-identify’ a genome should think again, Venter says. Equally, anyone whose genome is on the database should be asked if they are comfortable with the idea that anonymity cannot be guaranteed. Any agency that claims that genome information can be both anonymous and in the public domain is possessed of a “silly-assed notion”, he states.

He is most concerned about misuse of data on the cloud, and is working hard to make sure HLI’s ocean of patient data cannot be used for nefarious purposes. “I trust my own opinion more than I trust some pop science ethics commentator’s,” says Venter. “To me ethics are something that every person either has or doesn’t have. No priest of science can tell you what your ethics should or could be.”