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by __alexs 449 days ago
Often it can. And even in cases where currently it can't the technology will improve, costs will come down.
1 comments

Yeah, eventually, but it may be a while.
DNA sequencing costs for a full human genome have outpaced Moore's law. I wouldn't bet on it.
Sequencing costs dropped dramatically in a window that started when sequencing was done highly inefficiently. That gave folks the false impression that DNA sequencing would continue to halve in price every ~X years.

The NIH occasionally updates this chart (note: Y axis is log scale)

https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/DNA-Sequen...

You can see there was a dramatic reduction in costs from 2008 to 2015, as several vendors released several substantial technology improvements, and a slow improvement from 2015 to now, but it's roughly flatlined, and there isn't much investment in developing new technologies now.

To the surprise of many, having enormous amounts of genomic data hasn't been the clear-cut improvement to human health, although there are some exceptions (especially cancer identification and personalized treatment). If we truly wanted to, we could spend capital and build out the sequencing, compute, and storage infrastructure to sequence every person on the planet at least once at 50X coverage, and store the data in perpetuity.