I think that Nowak’s commentary was very helpful in understanding the Fleischmann article. The Fleischmann article was hard for me to read, because it was long and filled with technical terms (the majority of which I didn’t understand), so it was helpful to have shorter article to break down the Fleischmann one. I thought Nowak’s commentary also offered a glimpse into the early days of genome science because it offered perspectives from people involved in the early days of genome sequencing (such as Fleischmann himself). A major thing that stood out to me from these articles was just how far we’ve come in genome science in such a short period of time. When those articles were being written, not very many genomes had been sequenced and the techniques used have improved vastly in a relatively short period of time when you compare them to what’s used today. From our current standpoint, this added a lot of background knowledge on sequencing to what I currently know about it. I don’t know very much about sequencing technology currently, but these articles gave me a good idea on how sequencing technology came about and how much it’s evolved to be more efficient since then.
