The way you described the historical background of the findings was very interesting. You definitely got me as a new follower. I really liked how you linked it to the Human Genome Project which in my opinion was the most profound undertaking of the past 20 years. Looking back at that time when only Sanger sequencing was available, it is almost unimaginable how much effort and time was required to achieve this task. Furthermore, the much greater task was then to put the small pieces of DNA together, as Sanger sequencing usually yielded fragments of only up to 1000 base pairs. Now imagine you have a puzzle with 3 billion pieces and you have to find the exact pieces that fit - quite a tedious task. Today, with the next generation sequencing methods and with the complete assembly of a human genome it has become quite "simple" to analyse the complete genome of thousands of people in a short time. Regarding the costs, it is almost incredible that the sequencing of the first human genome cost about 3 billion dollars. Today this has been reduced to only 1000 dollars (it becomes cheaper every day), which makes the process of genome analysis much more affordable and accessible for the broader mass.
Thank you for your intriguing post!