>edit: To add an anecdote that I believe I read on HN; regarding the topic of the huge datamine of DNA and other health data provided by the U.S. government, a

>edit: To add an anecdote that I believe I read on HN; regarding the topic of the huge datamine of DNA and other health data provided by the U.S. government, a commenter said that the reason it was all on FTP was because professors couldn't download large datasets via their web browser, or some such technical hiccup. All data on the sequence read archive (SRA), the main worldwide database for sequencing reads from NCBI, is accessible via FTP and via ascp. FTP is slow, ascp is blazing fast.