It currently costs 5,000 euros and takes one week to sequence one genome on site at the center in Estonia, so much of the sequencing has been outsourced to the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where it costs 1,000 euros per donor. Genotyping, which involves taking 1 million chunks of the most important genetic data from the donor, costs 10 times less and is 10 times faster than harvesting the entire genetic code. Thus far, 20,000 of Estonia’s DNA samples have been genotyped and 2,300 have been fully sequenced. Because the country’s population is fairly homogenous—95 percent of people are ethnically Estonian or Russian—scientists can fill in the gaps for those who have been genotyped using information from people who have been fully sequenced.

Despite the program’s cost, its leaders are optimistic. “I am absolutely positive that in a foreseeable future, every individual will have their genetic information known, at least to their doctor,” says Ain Aaviksoo, who works for Estonia's Ministry of Social Affairs and is spearheading the project from the governmental side. Aaviksoo’s more immediate goal is to have 250,000 individuals in Estonia either genotyped or fully sequenced in the next two to three years. During the first recruitment round, which lasted from 2002 to 2011, more than half of all Estonian medical professionals cooperated with the biobank, agreeing to integrate the process of donating into normal doctors’ visits for those who were interested. By 2020, Aaviksoo tells me, everyone with an Estonian ID card might have the chance to opt in to the biobank if they want to do so.

Some are skeptical as to how valuable the predictions from the data will actually be in helping doctors improve their patients’ health. In a 2012 article in The Atlantic, David Ewing Duncan discusses the two primary schools of thought: Some people consider genes to be “near-magical fortune-tellers about a person’s health future,” he says, while others claim that the “genes as crystal balls” line of thinking is unrealistic because it doesn’t take environmental factors into account. Both sides are right, Duncan concludes, because genes are “just part of the equation telling us what is happening, or might happen, to our bodies in time.” Ultimately, the use of genomics to study diseases is a practice of probability.

Nevertheless, Metspalu believes that the predictive power of the genetic data will enable the Estonian health-care system to shift from reactive to more preventative. “Today we are mostly treating the patients,” he tells me in an email. “But we should keep them healthy instead.” When a person knows about his or her personal genetic tendencies, it can motivate him or her towards a healthy lifestyle. The knowledge can also serve as another factor for doctors to consider in diagnoses. Metspalu estimates that the Genome Center will be able to begin providing information to its gene donors (and their doctors) through the e-Health portal within the next six months.