New fiber optic network to help R.I. gov't offices master volumes of data

Prof. Jennifer Specker holds up a transparency sheet and shows how painstaking it used to be to sequence the genes of tiny organisms. Scientists such as herself had to treat them radioactively, and then sit with a ruler and draw lines connecting the nucleotides. It might take a week to collect 20 to 100 bits of data. But no more.

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