Human Genome Revolution

Ten years after sequencing the entire human genome, some call the achievement a false start; The Economist calls it only the beginning of a marathon that has begun to revolutionize biology. “Finding the sequence—even the full range of sequences—is, though, just the beginning. You then have to do something useful with the result. This is where the computing comes in. Computers allow individual genomes—all 3 billion base pairs of them—to be compared…And comparing the DNA from cells within an individual can show how tissues develop and become differentiated from one another, and what goes wrong in diseases like cancer.”