[extropy-chat] Harv's Explanation for Slow Progress

[bradbury]

On Mon, Nov 17, 2003 at 8:10pm Damien Broderick <thespike at earthlink.net> wrote:

> Yeah, but consider: the genome got done faster than anyone expected,
> or at least *as* fast if you're scrupulous in your accounting. It's
> a pretty good paradigm. (True, the Powers That Be, public and private,
> flung a shitload of $$$ at it.)

Hmmmm.... an interesting example since I was one person who flung
a shitload of $$$ at it (relatively speaking).

The fundamental problem in doing the HGP was the need for high
throughput sequencing.  The powers that ran the project knew this
and I would guess that between the early-to-mid '90s probably threw
about $100M at solving the problem.  Perhaps $10M of that was really
effective -- there were about 5 academic groups at the time really
making good progress.  Applied Biosystems and Molecular Dynamics
on the industrial side might have been equal or double that effort.
But they were building on the academic work significantly.  I attempted
to run 2 groups in Russia to work on it at the time.  One got a working
but not industrial level product.  Cost was probably $200-400K.
In contrast the industrial level genome sequencing center at MIT
which used a lot of custom designed machinery probably cost tens
of millions of dollars.  However the high throughput genome centers
we (in the U.S.) have now (and those in Europe and Japan) are still cranking out genomic sequences at a high rate.

So the investment was worthwhile -- for perhaps for a combined
government/industry investment of $150M one got a cost reduction
in the HGP of perhaps $1B.  (I am guessing at these figures and they should not be cited without confirmation.)  But Damien is correct
that the HGP got done ahead of time and under budget.  A significant
reason for that was an investment in the basic technology required
to accomplish that.

One can consider past investments in basic technologies required
to move us (humanity) forward.  The Manhattan Project is the first that comes to my mind.  Of course one can adopt a variety of perspectives
as to whether these investments helped or hurt us.  In the case of the
HGP I would think they are helping us.

Robert


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