The cost of sequencing a human genome has plummeted over the past 15 years from one hundred million dollars to one thousand. Every seven months, the rate of sequencing doubles, with projections that by 2025 the genome of every known and catalogued species on Earth will have been spelled out, sometimes several times over.
“In theory, more data means more information and more knowledge. But in practice, we tend to get overwhelmed by the data and don’t know where to look,” says Niranjan Nagarajan, also at the GIS. “We have to invest in building systems that can cope with the data.”
