Chouinard claims steady progress and credits a combination of growing trust in the community and aggressive clinic outreach using an electronic record database brought online with the help of federal grant money.

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Mike Kostoff, a brokerage consultant and managing partner at Kostoff Group, says the strategy seems sound, and using the Merrill Lynch brand instead of Bank of America's name could help the online product succeed.

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Church, who started the Personal Genome Project and is founder of the gene-scanning company Knome, envisions a Wikipedia-style model for interpreting the genome, where experts (using their real namea) collaborate online to help people interpret their genome results.

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