>Biology has always been largely hypothesis-free. I think Dr.Lander is talking about having open infrastructures and databases cataloging human genome variatio

>Biology has always been largely hypothesis-free. I think Dr.Lander is talking about having open infrastructures and databases cataloging human genome variations; that allow everyone explore the datasets to find new patterns. You are right searching through BLAST is easy. However, maintaining and updating entries into the NCBI BLAST databases is not. Genomes are sequenced, assembled and submitted to NCBI every day. Cataloguing the variations in different strains of the different species, and identifying real novel evolutionary variations compared to just noises to existing reference genomes is not an easy task (1000 Genomes, dbSNP, malaria genome network, etc.) It is analogous to saying, Googling is easy but building and maintaining a search engine is not. I get what you are saying that some important discoveries are made by accidents, but the open data and intuitive platforms need to be there for the inspirational late night "Showerthought" googling-that-leads to-insight to happen in the first place.