I have always been an admirer of IBM’s technology starting with using the old 360-370 machines and even on a rare occasion helping to repair a 370. IBM is one of the few corporations left that continues with the tradition that understanding basic scientific research is important to the future of capitalistic endeavor.
Developing a tool that can provide accurate, fast and cheap DNA and RNA sequencing will be the principle break-though for biological taxonomy in the 21st century. I can imagine no other tool that will be of more importance to humankind’s immediate future in medicine, botany, zoology, sociology or any branch of life sciences. However, delivering a complete genome analysis for $100-$1,000 using nanopore technology, whilst a significant breakthrough, is not in itself the key. The key is to make nanopore DNA/RNA decoding units very cheaply! They need to be so cheap that every scientist that needs one can have one. They need to be as readily available as a good research microscope, and at base prices in the $1,000-$5,000 range with available software for data analysis similar to those currently found associated with scanning electron microscopes, X-ray machines and hydrocarbon well logging software.
Even in palaeobiology the study of fossil material can be advanced by such tools. I think there are places in the Devonian, Carboniferous and Permian where it is possible to find fossilized material in which the original organic material is not completely degraded to the level that all of the DNA has been destroyed. To sequence what remains of the DNA of such finds could lead to a huge understanding of past life.
The following video gives some background information:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKi30ai35mU
See the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group research site:
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/nanopore/
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/gpu/
gfh 04/06/2010