This post is part of a series on Google's Project Baseline and my perspective as an amateur bioinformatician.

The Human Genome Project will probably go down in history as the biggest government project to ever finish so early and under budget.  It pulled the entire genomics industry up by their bootstraps and precipitated a drop in cost for DNA sequencing far below the Moore's law-type predictions that had been the conventional wisdom in the industry.  Today it costs well under $1000 and a day to sequence a human genome, a task that cost the Human Genome Project upwards of one billion dollars and 13 years only a few years ago.  

This all sounds like quite a boon for the computational biologists, right? Surely now we can sequence everyone's genome and tease out the genetic basis of disease for the betterment of all human-kind! Not so fast -- the laws of combinatorics are working against researchers in the field, as you'll soon see.