Crossing the Pacific

Sorry for the lack of posts. I just returned from the US and I'm recovering from jetlag in Taipei.

On my last day at Caltech, just for fun, I gave a lunch talk on my genomics work with BGI. I'll give a similar talk next week at the Taiwan National Center for Theoretical Science to an audience of mathematicians and physicists.

During the talk last week I joked that if we discover some genes affecting cognition, it might be more significant than all my work in theoretical physics. I also mentioned that, because sequencing costs are going down exponentially, I occasionally get the feeling that our work is unnecessary: the explosion of genomic data will produce much more powerful results almost by accident in the next decade or two. So why should we kill ourselves today? People in the audience immediately pointed out that this is always the case in science -- you do what you can with current technology, even though your efforts will seem puny when viewed in retrospect by future experimenters with vastly superior capabilities. However, most areas of science aren't moving quite as fast as genomics, so the feeling is especially strong from my vantage point.