Well for one thing, around 2000 we completed our first human genome sequencing effort of Craig Venter's genome at a cost of $3 billion over 10 years. Today we can sequence an entire human genome for about $1000 in a few days, and we've sequenced thousands of genomes including all kinds of cells and organisms that affect human health. We're generating craploads of very valuable data just waiting to be explored.

We can now take data from a computer and synthesise DNA for a cell from basically nothing, load that DNA into a 'blank' cell and start it up, making it grow and replicate - almost like making life!

We can use CRISPR/Cas9 to accurately cut and paste active DNA anywhere we want with high precision.

All these tools are ready, we just have to work out how to use them

Data doesn't equal breakthrough. For example : better climate models doesn't help us to fight climate change; centuries of football scores doesn't help us to win bets :-)

Really?

I meant data doesn't always equal huge breakthrough. For example, theorems, neural networks, quantum physics, etc. existed long before data were available. Data helps, supercharges them, but that doesn't count as "breakthrough" for me (so, I have a very ambitious notion of breakthrough)

If we don't learn a crap load from DNA in the next 20 years, I'll be very surprised.

DNA technology is hardly used medically, even though it is becoming cheap and relatively old.

CRISPR/Cas9 is more precise than technologies before, but still not perfect: http://www.nature.com/news/enzyme-tweak-boosts-precision-of-...

... yet ;)

These things have a way of being impossible until they are not. It used to be impossible to communicate with someone a great distance away, then we invented the telegraph. It used to be impossible to see someone at a great distance, then our seemingly-unrelated breakthroughs in network technology brought us easy consumer video chat.

Wikipedia has a list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_medicine_and_medic...