Moore's law is a law developed by Gordon Moore stating the trend between proccessing power every 2 years. Moore's law hypothesizes that the number of transistors in a CPU will double every 2 years. In the sequencing costs graph, we see that his law states that cost per genome halves every 2 years. His law is in effect until 2008, when the production phase of ENCODE began. Companies like Illumina started developing 2nd generation sequencing which significantly brought down the cost of sequencing. Demand from the medical industry also fueled the need for faster and cost efficient methods of sequencing.
Moore's Law sequencing costs
Economic overview of HGP
Economic overview of ENCODE
ENCODE's economic impact in terms of government economy benefits are basically the same as the impact from the HGP as ENCODE is an extension of the HGP past 2003. ENCODE has put a whole new area of medicine on the market and has produced new ways for doctors to diagnose and detect early signs of genetic diseases. ENCODE has helped deliver new sequencing technologies, DNase-Seq, and Next Gen seq onto the market, thereby lowering the cost to sequence genomes. Since ENCODE is still an ongoing project and most of the genetic sequencing is still limited to institutions, the overall economic impact is unclear since the methods used in diagnostic medicine are still relatively experimental.
ENCODE has a huge impact on the US economy and has improved the economy vastly through Economic output and job creation. According to an article by battelle.org,, the HGP has created 310,000 jobs, 67 billion dollars in economic output and 20 billion in personal income just in 2010. Throughout its years the HGP has produced a whopping 796 billion dollar economic output and has created over 3 million job years for citizens. That being said, the HGP has truly been a great investment for the U.S. government and continues to prosper as the market for genetic sequencing increases.