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It’s Official now: Cost of Genome Sequence Down to $5,000 from $2B in 2003

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601124&sid=aEUlnq6ltPpQ&refer=home

[About 1,000,000-fold cheaper in 6 years.
1,000,000,000,000-fold cheaper than when I started doing DNA sequencing back in 1986.]

Only about 20 human genomes have been fully sequenced to date. Complete Genomics said it will sequence 1,000 by year’s end, Reid said.

[Elsewhere the company has said that they will sequence 1 million humans in the next five years.  
By then someone should easily reach the $100 genome.

Of that $5,000 that it currently costs, only $1,000 is actual chemical reagents, the rest is labor, and we know where the value of that is heading due to the Depression, not to mention that DNA sequencing is heavily compute-dependent, and as they have more genomes, the ease of automatically assembling all of the data should diminish rapidly.

So, since they are starting with a real cost of $1,000, it shouldn’t take much time to drive it much further downward.

Given that the pace of reduction has been accelerating, from about 10,000X per decade to faster than 1,000,000X per decade, then you have to ask “How low can it go?”

I don’t really know.  
$1, $0.10, $0.01?

If you ever wonder how I managed to see deflation coming instead of inflation, like 99% of other people, it’s probably due to getting to participate in and watch this process of hyperrapid DNA information cost reduction, much faster than Moore’s Law.

The limit would probably be reached when the money that could be made from sequencing whichever remaining people, organisms or cellular biopsies that haven’t been analyzed yet doesn’t justify the investment in the R&D.

Aside from the equipment costs, the fundamental operating costs are for chemical reagents that can be grown microbiologically, ie. enzymes and dyes, and the energy it takes to run the computers.

We will shortly be awash in data, and we’ll end up discovering an infinite number of new questions to ask.
And end up just as dissatisfied with the costs of analyzing everything else – proteins, metabolites.

Only half a mile more until we reach Heaven, but we’re just a quarter mile outside of Hell.

But that’s how Science really always has been despite the hype that we are always about to have all the answers.  Science is a journey of exploration, where we primarily discover an ever expanding collection of new questions to ask.

Imagine knowledge as a spherical ball of tangled string (or a lung or brain or kidney tissue), and the larger the ball of knowledge grows, even faster grows the surface area which is the awareness of our ignorance.]

- comments by SpiralMan