The Human Genome Is Having Its Facebook Moment

In June, 4.1 petabytes of cancer data went online on a new platform, run by the University of Chicago, called the Genomic Data Commons. Four petabytes is about sixteen times all the information in the Library of Congress—but only about four percent of the data stored by Facebook as of 2012.

In other words, the data we generate about how we live our lives is much more vast and organized than the data about biological life itself, and the technology used to organize it is more seamless and sophisticated. But given the evolution of technology, that makes sense. Consider how we documented day-to-day life before smartphones and services like Facebook: you had to have a camera, which wrote to a card, from which you transferred photos to a hard drive. That recorded limited metadata, generally date and time and some information about the camera itself.

As phones got better cameras and those cameras were connected by software to the phone’s other features, pictures could go straight to the cloud with location data; software on the other end could...