1.3 The development of high-speed DNA sequencing: Jurassic Park, Neanderthal, Moore, and you

Since Watson and Crick's 1953 landmark discovery that biological information was encoded in DNA as a sequence of chemical building-block “letters”, developing technology for reading (or “sequencing”) this chemical code has been fundamental to advances in biology and medicine. Techniques that first enabled this were invented by Sanger in 1978, and were taken to massively parallel form by 454 Life Sciences in 2003 [1]. This ushered in the current or “next-gen” era of genome sequencing technologies for research, medicine, and the emerging field of Genomic-Personalized Medicine, in which healthcare is more fully informed by the individuals' personal genetic makeup.