Originally Posted by ToddStark

Hi Tom, thanks for your thoughts!

There are short term costs and there are long term costs. Sometimes the long term costs of something aren't obvious for a long time. My perspective is that we are very far from a complete understanding of how genes construct organisms, in fact in a sense it appears that we've just discovered the basic principles, that's what makes molecular biology so exciting. So we really don't know the long term cost of incompleteness of our ongoing historical catalog.