[sa501428]

These days it costs <$1000 to sequence a de novo genome (not cents). For human genomes it's cheaper of course, but that's because we have a reference sequence to compare to. The Human Genome Project (and other efforts) had to build that reference and annotate it. So not quite an apples-to-apples comparison to compare sequencing of a modern-day patient sample to building a reference genome from scratch.

[credit_guy]

> These days it costs <$1000 to sequence a de novo genome (not cents).

Ok, that's still 6 orders of magnitude cheaper, isn't it? You could argue that $1000 now would not be possible without the initial investment of billions, but we'll never know. What's undeniable is that independent of the advances in biotech, the advances in computing between say, 1990 and 2010, were astounding. If the Human Genome Project had been postponed by 20 years, it could have easily been done for 1% of the pricetag, without any other breakthrough (by the way, Celera did what they did because some really cool algorithmic breakthroughs). And it's not like in 1990 people didn't know about Moore's law, and couldn't project where the computational power would be in 20 years.

The same question stands now: if you want to do Project X, and you consider the choice to do it now or do it in 20 years, is it likely that you could do it for much cheaper in 20 years, and can you afford to wait 20 years? If we are talking about CO2 scrubbing from the atmosphere, then maybe we can't really wait, but if we just want to better understand Big Bang, or the Muon gee minus 2, then maybe we can.

[TheBigSalad]

That's a fair question. I've never heard it argued that the human genome project was anything other than a huge success, but I'm curious to look into it more. That being said it probably doesn't apply here. Considering we were sending people to the moon 50 years ago, I don't feel space travel has scaled similarly. In contrast to your human genome example think how far back the scientific community was set back by canceling the Super Conducting Supercollider. There's just no other way to get this information from Earth. You could argue that the knowledge could wait 100 years, but you could say that about a lot of things.