In the early 1970s George Church did his graduate research with sequencing pioneer Walter Gilbert. In 2005, he developed one of the first next-generation sequencing technologies. AP PHOTO / LISA POOLE
As you read this article, perhaps on your smartphone or iPad, try to remember what the world was like on October 20, 1986, when the first issue of The Scientist was published.
Apple’s Macintosh computer was just two years old. The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was celebrating its first birthday, while GenBank, all of four years old, held just under 10,000 sequences (a total of 9.6 million bases). The NCSA Mosaic web browser was still seven years away, and it would be another two years beyond that before J. Craig Venter and colleagues at the Institute for Genomic Research would first be able to read the genetic sequence of a “free-living organism,” Haemophilus influenzae.
In 1986, Leroy Hood published a prototype design for world’s first ...
