Amazon’s cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services, will store for public use the entire contents of the National Institutes of Health’s 1000 Genomes Project, a survey of genetic information from 1,700 individuals that is some 200 terabytes in size. Anyone can access the information for free, and there is no requirement to share any research results.
via Amazon Web Services Big Free Genetic Database - NYTimes.com.
When I was a budding molecular biologist in 1995, we could identify the nucleobases of a segment of DNA. I would take a print-out of some 200 characters' worth of shuffling the letters AGCT and type them into an email, careful to make no mistakes.
Then I would send that email to a computer in Washington D.C. (I was in Clayton, VIC).
Within 15 minutes I received a reply that told me which proteins would be transcribed from those nucleobases.
I thought it was magical.