Interviewee: Michael Hunkapiller. Mike Hunkapiller, a developer of automated sequencing, speaks about the effect of automation on sequencing in the late 1990s. (DNAi Location: Genome > The project > Players > Technology > A thousand-fold increase in five years)

The first free-living organism was sequenced at The Institute for Genomic Research in 1995, it was a few million base pairs long. It took them about six to nine months to collect the data and, and interpret it and, and get a close sequence. If you jump forward a little bit to three years later, the first complex organism was done, Drosophila, in about the same amount of time, it was a hundred and twenty million base pairs long. You jump forward another year and you have the human sequence done at three billion base pairs, also in about nine months. And so just over the sort of mid-life evolution of the, of the automated technology, you had far more than a thousand-fold increase in throughput.

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