Why would sequencing follow Moore's law when it isn't really related to computing? Sequencing technology is limited by our knowledge of chemistry, physics, and mechanical engineering to apply the concepts. None of which is doubling every 2 years.<p>There are 3rd gen sequencing techs that provide much longer reads than previous tech like Illumina but they also get much higher rate of erroneous reads.<p>Another point is current sequencing tech is enough for tasks that were just unfeasible to do couple of years ago. Such as HiC (Extracting 3D structure of chromosomes with sequencing) or more recent applications like DNA Microscopy, where you can construct a very high resolution visual image of a cell just by using sequencing.<p>Our usage of genomic data isn't really limited by sequencing tech since DNA is such a complex structure that we don't even fully understand the data we currently have.
As somebody who has worked in genomics for decades, I don't really see progress in DNA sequencing as being motivated by extrinsic factors. Put another way, there really isn't enough scientific discovery being driven by new sequence data to justify the spending. Many articles have been written claiming that sequencing is going to revolutionize medicine. It's been a very useful research tool, and <i>some</i> genomics has been very valuable medically, but it doesn't live up to the hype.
The key problem is that DNA sequencing for individuals is not useful (yet) for that individual. Right now DNA sequencing is useful for scientific research and for industrial research. But the current price is basically fine for that; it isn't anywhere near the main component of the cost of research.<p>If there were a reason to get the DNA of each American sequenced, the price would go down drastically. Like if there was any real medical usefulness of having your DNA sequenced. But right now there isn't.<p>It's kind of like the Apple I era of personal computing. It's finally cheap enough that individuals can get this technology themselves. There just isn't really a great reason to, besides interested hobbyists.
23andme will let you download a zip file of your sequence data. But if I recall the data had only about 4 million nucleotides. So I assumed that I need to get their "baseline" human full genome somewhere and my file is just the difference.<p>But the above assumption can't be correct given that it still costs $1000 for a full sequence according the the parent article. Can anyone clarify ?
Moore's Law in context is doubling every 2 years? This isn't general news; you'd need to be very clued in to understanding what the problem is. Doubling every 2 years is not the natural state of things. That sort of growth rate is hard to maintain even from truly trivial starting points (my favorite example is the wheat & chessboard parable [0]).<p>The news is processes that don't stagnate fairly quickly after getting past the low hanging fruit of research and development. Processors have maintained an exponential growth rate for ~50 years and that has completely revolutionised every aspect of society and realistically probably our relationship with the world at large. We don't expect things to do that, and although it is taking a lot longer than everyone expected at some point the transistor doubling will have to end.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_and_chessboard_problem" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_and_chessboard_problem</a>
In order for the public to really want their genes sequenced,there will have to be privacy in place. Nobody should have access to the data. Just deliver it and provide analysis tools. Even then, it something you only need to do once. Demand won't get higher than that, so demand isn't really going to be a big price driver.