What struck me was not the announcement itself, but the name of the CEO: Cliff Reid, the CEO when I knew him in the 1980's of a text-search company called Verity. The connection hit me almost immediately. Genes are, in a sense, the instruction language for building humans (or any other living thing). And language is symbols that interact to build meaning. And, yes, of course, it was the same Cliff Reid I knew back in the late 1980's.
What Complete Genomics is doing with the $91 million it has raised so far is exciting. It has built a genome-sequencing factory and plans to build several more over the next few years. Many academic and commercial research facilities want one, as do several countries.
What I find interesting are the implications. Right now, a genome is akin to a novel written in an unknown language. There is a huge amount of information in there, but we can't understand it. Imagine getting a copy of Tolstoi's War and Peace in Russian and (assuming you can't read Russian) trying to figure out the story. Impossible. That's pretty much the situation of natural-language understanding at the time Reid joined Verity.
