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It's hard to tell whether HGP was a waste of money (trying too early to do what would inevitably be cheaper years later) or whether it really got us to today, f

It's hard to tell whether HGP was a waste of money (trying too early to do what would inevitably be cheaper years later) or whether it really got us to today, faster. Certainly many researchers were gainfully employed. Obviously, we should expect that some portion of the funding actually had lasting value. But some of it was bridge to nowhere economic stimulus, scaling up old tech to cover an entire human genome (which obviously has some potential value as well - getting more people into the field, sooner).

astrodust 13y ago
One of the big reasons it got cheaper over time was because the early work made it easier refine and improve later designs. This is fundamental to most any technology. A limiting factor was and remains compute power, but algorithmic improvements in bioinformatics outpaced Moore's Law. Imagine what it'd be like if we were just starting to sequence the human genome now, still completely in the dark on these things. Yes, it might be less expensive, but you'd also be missing out on a decade of groundbreaking research. The genome is like the worst program ever written, no comments, lots of duplicated code, full of bugs and hacks, and enormous in scale. We've spent the better part of a decade chipping away at understanding it and we're only just getting started. It was absolutely the right time to do it. We could've started in the 1980s but the compute power wasn't there, but by the mid 1990s you had enough to get by. If you needed a gigabyte of memory you had to fork out, but it wasn't impossible like it would've been in the 1980s.