First off DNA does not just sit around on it's own. You get computation from all the things wrapping around DNA. Making a the specific sequence less important than generally assumed.
Anyway, location is almost meaningless. It's the actual sequence that's important and the genome project did not provide a full sequence of an actual human genome. So again, useless on it's own with a completely arbitrary end date for 'success' that again did not actually mark the accomplishment of anything.
Worse, to be useful as a map you need to use much faster sequencing techniques to verify in what way some specific population is different from the average sequence. And then correlate that population with some difference to try and find out what that does. But, once you can do that you can do the entire sequence more cheaply.
At best it provided funding for biotech, at worst it was 100% political in both motivation and execution.
PS: ITER is more than 30 year old design at this point, we have several designs that should be vastly cheaper that are simply less verified. What ITER tests is not about cheap it's about verifying what's going on when you get more power from fusion than you get from external heating. That's critical for any form of sustained magnetic confinement. It also let's you test things like Tritium breeding that again required for D-T fusion at scale as we simply don't have enough Tritium to use it as fuel at scale but we have plenty of Lithium and Deuterium. It also tests remote handling of the containment vessel which is again required for any useful design etc. And to do all that and more you want to take the lowest risk path not just high risk high reward.
So I see you did not bother to check my profile before responding, so I'm not sure if it's worth even typing this out. You also have preposterous positions that are so far outside mainstream views that you must clearly be a full outsider, which would be 100% OK if you were bothering to support your positions at all. However, in case it is worthwhile...
I mostly study RNA, protein signaling, and protein-DNA interactions. So you're preaching to the choir on the necessity of moving beyond the simple map.
All of current day's techniques for interrogating what you want:
* ChIP-seq for
* Chromatin marks
* TF binding
* CTCF binding in particualr
* Enhancer identification
* Hi-C to find topologically associated domains and laminar domains
* Methyl seq
* RNA-seq (yes, even RNA-seq)
* Genome-wide association studies
* Linkage disequilibrium
ALL of these use the genome map as the basic founding block. Saying you don't need the genome map for this is like saying you don't need a compiler or interpreter or even an assembler to write code. Actually, it's more presposterous than that, one could feasibly write machine code in hex by hand, none of these basic building blocks of modern understanding of the cell would be possible without the genome as a basic map for study. A reference genome is the first step of study for any organism, because it is the foundation upon which everything else is built.
That's not to say we don't need in vitro study of individual proteins, loci, etc. We do. But we need much much more, and the genome map serves as a basis for nearly all study of individual loci these days.
>Worse, to be useful as a map you need to use much faster sequencing techniques to verify in what way some specific population is different from the average sequence. And then correlate that population with some difference to try and find out what that does. But, once you can do that you can do the entire sequence more cheaply.
This is wrong, a map is even more helpful if you can only do low throughput sequencing. In 2001-2003, before the advent of massive sequencing capacity, the genome was super useful. SNP chips, like the ones that 23andMe use to this very day, provide weak but cheap ways to profile common population variation, and the genome provides the way to start to link significant variants to protein coding genes, or enhancers or whatever other 3D features we discover in the future of genome research.
>At best it provided funding for biotech, at worst it was 100% political in both motivation and execution.
Yeah, tell that to all the biologists that use genome browsers, or do high throughput resquencing projects all the time. It's absolutely indefensible. Huge amounts of biotech also spun off of a small $3B government investment, just like the Silicon Valley spun off of lucrative defense contracts, but the government investment spurred industries that changed the world and and what we can do in it.
edit: you may have also skipped over my initial objection as "improving sequencing" would have been a great use of those funds.
I come at it from the plant side which did plenty of useful and actual DNA manipulation without a "map". Vs. the human side which was almost entirely focused on drugs.
So, saying it's necessary is absolute bullshit. Useful, sure, necessary no.
Further, if they had waited 5 years to start they could have finished at the same time or even faster for less money. It's execution was an extreme waste of resources without any need to 'hurry'.
Remember 1990 was 28 fucking years ago it was a very different time.
PS: That said 3 billion is a literal drop in the bucket. And yea, the output was not worthless in absolute terms, my objection is simply one of timing. It would have been like trying to build self driving cars in 1950 the tech was simply not ready.
Anyway, location is almost meaningless. It's the actual sequence that's important and the genome project did not provide a full sequence of an actual human genome. So again, useless on it's own with a completely arbitrary end date for 'success' that again did not actually mark the accomplishment of anything.
Worse, to be useful as a map you need to use much faster sequencing techniques to verify in what way some specific population is different from the average sequence. And then correlate that population with some difference to try and find out what that does. But, once you can do that you can do the entire sequence more cheaply.
At best it provided funding for biotech, at worst it was 100% political in both motivation and execution.
PS: ITER is more than 30 year old design at this point, we have several designs that should be vastly cheaper that are simply less verified. What ITER tests is not about cheap it's about verifying what's going on when you get more power from fusion than you get from external heating. That's critical for any form of sustained magnetic confinement. It also let's you test things like Tritium breeding that again required for D-T fusion at scale as we simply don't have enough Tritium to use it as fuel at scale but we have plenty of Lithium and Deuterium. It also tests remote handling of the containment vessel which is again required for any useful design etc. And to do all that and more you want to take the lowest risk path not just high risk high reward.