Kinda cool, I'm out of my depth here. What would be some interesting things to do with this once it was built?
Is that true? And if so, is it all open source or free?
It's something that's kind of interesting to me. I really enjoyed biotech and chemistry in HS but ended up going in a different direction. If this is something that you can just get into now as a hobby maybe I'll jump down the rabbithole
Last I checked 23andMe didn't perform whole genome sequencing but looked at some number of point mutations. It depends on what information you want. Eg for the sake of interest of actional genomics data.
And the sequencing machines and chemicals also don't come cheap, as the market has long been dominated by one vendor.