A thousand dollars is largely seen as the goal of modern genomic sequencing. That's a full human genome sequenced for $1000, a task that cost $500 million only 5 years ago, as Duncan notes.

Using next gen sequencing approaches (such as Illumina, 454 and ABI's SOLiD), a genome currently costs around $100,000 to sequence. That said, the cost in producing, storing and analysing that sequence is much greater.

Give the orders-of-magnitude rate of change in this area every few years, we need to start getting ready for the $1000 genome now, with simple software development approaches that can keep up.