But he adds that a breakthrough in this field would clearly be gold-medal material.

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Now, 15 years after that first sequencing breakthrough, the field is finally on the cusp of making a real impact, as the cost of sequencing human DNA has gone so low that scientists are likely to sequence hundreds or thousands of genomes over the next couple years.

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"Those of us in the field really see this as a breakthrough moment, " said Suzanne Topalian, a researcher at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and lead author of one of the studies.

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The Nortel breakthrough underscores the need for genuine deregulation in the entire field of communications.

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Nearly three decades later in 2007, while visiting as a professor of chemistry at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Yazami and Robert Grubbs, also a chemistry professor at the Caltech and the recipient of the 2005 Nobel Laureate for Chemistry, were rumored to have made a major breakthrough in carbon-fluoride technology that would revolutionize the field of energy storage.

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