Hi Evan, great piece — didn’t know about Wu’s technique! While Sanger was definitely a multi-generational talent, there are two other people that have Nobels in the same field: John Bardeen (transistor and superconductivity; physics) and Barry Sharpless (asymmetric oxidations and click chemistry; chemistry).
A fantastic summary! When I first started in a lab roughly 15 years ago, 454 seemed like a miracle compared to Sanger. Now, I can crank out yards of DNA on a Nanopore on a random Tuesday. This piece made me reappreciate the insane speed at which these technologies have developed!!
Hi Evan, I appreciated your summary. The cost curve on sequencing is the part of this history that doesn't get enough attention. We talk about the science breakthroughs but the real inflection point is when sequencing gets cheap enough to apply broadly — not just in clinical settings but across agriculture, materials, industrial biotech, environmental monitoring. That's when DNA stops being a research tool and starts operating as a platform technology, the way software became infrastructure for every industry. We're closer to that moment than most people realize. I'd love to hear what you think.
Hi Evan, great piece — didn’t know about Wu’s technique! While Sanger was definitely a multi-generational talent, there are two other people that have Nobels in the same field: John Bardeen (transistor and superconductivity; physics) and Barry Sharpless (asymmetric oxidations and click chemistry; chemistry).
Thank you for flagging this. We'll issue a correction!
A fantastic summary! When I first started in a lab roughly 15 years ago, 454 seemed like a miracle compared to Sanger. Now, I can crank out yards of DNA on a Nanopore on a random Tuesday. This piece made me reappreciate the insane speed at which these technologies have developed!!
Fantastic review of this incredible and powerful technology, which is still evolving in real-time!
Hi Evan, I appreciated your summary. The cost curve on sequencing is the part of this history that doesn't get enough attention. We talk about the science breakthroughs but the real inflection point is when sequencing gets cheap enough to apply broadly — not just in clinical settings but across agriculture, materials, industrial biotech, environmental monitoring. That's when DNA stops being a research tool and starts operating as a platform technology, the way software became infrastructure for every industry. We're closer to that moment than most people realize. I'd love to hear what you think.
Thanks for reading Jack! This is what I was trying to get at in the final paragraph of the PacBio section but you've put it much more eloquently.