When Gordon Moore first wrote about chips getting smaller, it offered a story for rapid progress, a kind of template for the future, but let's not pretend a paper alone drove down the actual cost of sequencing a genome.
It's like someone telling you a recipe for paella; it's a good guide, but you still need to find the saffron, the rice, and most importantly, the skill in the kitchen to make it happen.
The National Human Genome Research Institute’s tracking of those costs shows the real action was in labs, with scientists inventing new chemicals and building machines, not just reading about transistor density.
The original article set a narrative beat for progress, but the journey itself was paved with hard-won biological breakthroughs and massive practical investment, not just an idea.
For instance, the development of technologies like next-generation sequencing, with its entirely new approach to reading DNA, required immense scientific effort and funding, far beyond what any single informational benchmark could provide.