It is 14 years since Tony Blair and Bill Clinton invited the world's media to the White House for an announcement that would have seemed like science fiction just a few years earlier: the entire human genome - the genetic blueprint of human beings - had been mapped for the first time.

Looking somewhat awestruck, the prime minister and the president promised their press conference would pave the way for 'a new era of genetic medicine'.

This was not a hollow pledge, but genomics is only now beginning to fulfil its potential.

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The two world leaders were right in their view that genomics would prove to be a disruptive technology (not that they would have used the term).

But just as it took the mass-produced Ford Model T to translate the invention of the automobile into a technology that changed the world, so the first map of the human genome was not quite the game changer Blair and Clinton anticipated.

'The real catalyst for the take-off of genomics has been the next-generation technology that has brought the cost of gene sequencing to an incredibly low level,' says Jung Ryu, a life sciences tools analyst at New York-based fund manager OrbiMed Advisors, which runs the Biotech Growth and Worldwide Healthcare investment trusts in the UK.

'That first human genome project was completed at a cost of $3 billion (1.8 billion) - by the end of this year, it will be possible to buy table-top gene sequencing equipment that can do the same job for less than $1,000.'

At that price, genomics research is possible in university labs all around the world, and projects of previously unimaginable ambition become cost-effective.

For example, in July in the UK, the National Health Service began awarding contracts for its 100,000 Genomes Project, an initiative to map the DNA of 100,000 Britons by 2017.

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The genius of genomics