Focus isn't everything At each step in the development of genomics, projects were criticized as being unfocused and non-goal oriented. The term 'fishing expidition' was used, since the projects by themselves didn't test any hypotheses. One could easily argue that many genomics projects aren't science at all. Yet, there is no doubt that all areas of biology have benefited from genomics. The shift from elaborate contig construction to direct shotgun sequencing is a great illustration of what bioinformatics is all about.
Genomics opens up fundamentally different approaches to studying biological questions.
What is needed is the imagination to think on a larger scale. In a sense, the challenge to genomics is to realize that we can assume that complete genomic maps, and in many genomic sequences, and complete sets of genomic or cDNA clones already exist. How can we use them to our advantage. The big genomics projects are only the beginning. Even small labs can take advantage of the results from genomics.