Bioinformatics and the Rate of Research
An article from earlier this year at KurzweilAI.net does an excellent job of illustrating the advances that are driving the increasing rate of progress in medical research.
The parts for a DNA synthesizer can now be purchased for approximately $10,000. By 2010 a single person will be able to sequence or synthesize 10^10 bases a day. Within a decade a single person could sequence or synthesize all the DNA describing all the people on the planet many times over in an eight-hour day or sequence his or her own DNA within seconds....
Indeed, the continuing costs of sequencing (expendables such as reagents) have fallen exponentially over the time period covered by Figure 1.5 Lander et al., state in Nature that by 2000 the total costs of sequencing had fallen by a factor of 100 in ten years, with costs falling by a factor of 2 approximately every eighteen months.6 With the caveat that there are only limited data to date, it does appear that the total cost of sequencing and synthesis are falling exponentially.
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Despite the fantastic nature of these numbers, there is no physical reason why sequencing an individual human genome should take longer than a few minutes.
The article as a whole is a doom and gloom effort relating to safety - but plenty of people are thinking hard about ensuring the safety of biotechnology (and nanotechnology). We should be celebrating the advances that will herald a new level of scientific understanding of the human body - and therapies to cure or prevent age-related diseases.