If you could find out your baby's future health problems right after he or she was born, would you want to know? Some new parents will get to make that decision soon. This month, doctors in Boston will begin the BabySeq project, in which they will sequence the genomes of newborns to look for signs of diseases that begin in childhood.

"We've been at an impasse for the last few years--we've had the technology to deliver information about future health, but we've not been able to use it because of all the issues around it," says Robert Green, a Harvard Medical School professor who is working on the BabySeq project.

It's routine for doctors to test newborns for up to 30 treatable diseases, and pregnant women can have blood tests to asses their risk of passing on diseases. But for this project, the team will look at 1,700 protein-coding genes that are strongly tied to diseases that begin during early childhood. Doctors will offer to sequence the genomes of 240 babies in intensive care at Boston Children's Hospital, as well as 240 healthy babies born at Brigham and Women's Hospital.