Science
The Human Genome Revolution: From $3 Billion to $200 and What We Found
The Human Genome Project cost $3 billion, took 13 years, and involved 20 countries — to produce a sequence that was still 8 percent incomplete. A single lab can now sequence a human genome for under $200 in a single day. That price collapse, steeper than Moore's Law for a decade straight, has changed medicine, ancestry research, evolutionary biology, and our understanding of what 'the genome' actually is. The truly complete human genome, published in 2022, revealed nearly 200 million base pairs we never knew existed and overturned the idea that most DNA has no function.