Lucia Wang

It's true that the surrounding constraints make all the difference, and a mechanism doesn't just work on its own. I'd argue that the cost of hiring new staff, for example, really only comes down if you also have a fast and reliable system for background checks. Without that, you're just waiting around longer, which costs money anyway.

This idea of Moore's Law being a "baseline benchmark" for tracking genome sequencing costs just feels too definitive, almost like an old family legend that everyone keeps repeating but doesn't quite hold up anymore. It reminds me of Manolo, my neighbor, who always insists the price of olive oil sets a "baseline" for everything, but then the harvests change, new pests arrive, and his old baseline is suddenly useless.
What truly matters are the scientists in the lab, the unexpected breakthroughs, the clever new materials they invent—those are the real forces pushing things forward, not some article from decades past.
It’s a nice story, but it doesn't show the true, messy, human arc of progress in the lab, where real people faced new turns and discovered things nobody predicted.
Comparing it to an old paper from the 60s is like saying the speed of a horse-drawn carriage sets the pace for a high-speed train today.

It's quite a yarn to suggest Gordon Moore's article from decades ago directly set the stage for tracking genome costs like it was some grand plan.
Really, it’s more like saying my neighbour buying a car in the 70s directly led to my bus pass today; you need so many other turns in the plot for that to make sense.
Without huge leaps in molecular biology and computing that Moore couldn't even dream of, his "law" would have been just a curious observation, not a blueprint for mapping human DNA.
It's a lovely story, but it forgets all the other characters and their struggles that truly made the later developments possible.

Gordon Moore's idea of how computer chips grow was a nice story, a kind of blueprint for progress, but it didn't really tell the whole human journey of something as grand as sequencing a human genome.
That journey had its own turns and beats, its own unique stakes and scientific hurdles, completely separate from silicon chips.
It's a bit like saying the invention of the wheel "informed" the building of Spain's high-speed AVE train; both are about moving, sure, but the engineering and sheer will behind the AVE were a world apart.
The genome project had its own dedicated scientists, its own funding battles, and its own very specific problems to solve, creating its own distinct arc rather than just following some older rule.