These rapid changes are a product of Moore’s law, which refers to the exponential growth that the computing industry experienced over the past decades. It is named after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, who in 1965 observed that computing capacity was doubling every other year. Exponential growth changes our lives and society at a pace that human brains, evolved to think linearly, cannot comprehend. Now consider that genotyping costs have dropped at a pace that surpasses Moore’s law; we’re just a few decades behind with respect to when we entered our exponential growth period. It took 2.7 billion dollars and 13 years to sequence the first human genome, published in 2003; today, we can sequence a human genome for less than $1000, in a single day. I predict that genetics will be the next major societal revolution. Like advances in computing, it will sneak up on us, and we will find ourselves in a world radically changed, for which we are largely unprepared.
