to fund drug development programs based on completely novel premises; to bring forward diagnostic tests in a market that even supporters termed "still embryonic"; and to market personal genomics, where it was being overshadowed by the Silicon Valley glamour and cash of 23andMe. By late 2008, the company was "between a rock and a hard place," in Stefansson's own words. Under threat of being delisted from Nasdaq for its flagging stock price, the company needed more capital just as the global markets were going into crisis. Although its scientists kept publishing breakthroughs at a remarkable rate, in late 2009, the company's listed US holding company, deCODE genetics, Inc., declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Its key assets - the heart of which was the Iceland genetics operation - were bought and kept running by a consortium of the company's two main original venture backers: ARCH Venture Partners and Polaris Ventures, along with Illumina, Inc., the dominant maker of genotyping chips and sequencing equipment. It abandoned work on its drug development programs. As a business, deCODE had in some sense gone back to the future: it was a 13-year-old company with a global reputation, again backed by its original VCs, which Newsweek called "the world's most successful failure." During the following period Stefansson mused publicly that deCODE had been founded between six and ten years too early. The technology for accurately reading DNA with sufficient detail, he reasoned, had not arrived until the mid-2000s, leaving deCODE in debt for years of R&D but based on findings that didn't provide a detailed enough insight into the biology of disease to swiftly create commercially compelling diagnostics and developmental drugs. What might provide that insight was population-scale WGS data. By 2010 Stefansson was outlining how to sequence a few thousand individuals and then use imputation - powered again by the genealogies - to ensure that deCODE would be the first in the world to have anything like it. In spite of its straitened circumstances, with Illumina as one of its owners the company could still receive the latest sequencing machines and reagents. In 2011, deCODE and Illumina collaborated on a paper that gave an early hint at the power of WGS imputation, turning 500 sequences into 40,000 whole genomes of data. This was enough to begin to discover rare variants, validated through replication in several other populations. Unlike common variants, mutations causing rare diseases tend to