Wired News delivered to your inbox or hand-held device. Looms Check yourself into Med-Tech Genomics is the new Internet, and the boom could be even longer and louder, Myhrvold told the group of journalists and industry leaders gathered by Rosetta Inpharmatics president Stephen Friend. It will rival anything the computer or communication industries gave done up until now. It has the potential to reshape the entire world economy in exactly the same way information technology has. Once a cosmologist who worked with Stephen Hawking at Cambridge University, he's also an accomplished chef, hunts for dinosaurs and gives talks on volcanoes in his spare time.
Genomics seems like as logical a next step as any.
But like computer power, he believes genomics will grow exponentially, by factors of millions, allowing what seems impossible today in genomics to become reality. Gordon Moore predicted in 1965 that computer processing power would double every 18 months, or 60 percent annually. Myhrvold predicts the same for genomics. The key metrics of genomics, he said, will continue to grow at such a rate for the next 40 years or until the field has grown a factor of a billion, whichever comes first. In fact, the amount of data in GenBank , the database repository of all of the Human Genome Project's gene sequences has grown at the Moore's Law rate since 1982.