While Moore’s law justifiably attracts considerable attention, less well known is what The Economist calls the Carlson curve: the epic collapse in costs for sequencing DNA. Thanks to ever-improving techniques, the cost of human genome sequencing fell from $1 billion in 2003 to well under $1,000 by 2022. That is, the price dropped a millionfold in under twenty years, a thousand times faster than Moore’s law. A stunning development hiding in plain sight.
