 A further crucial output was the acceleration in technology development the HGP brought about. It is safe to say that without the HGP (and subsequent initiatives such as the Advanced Sequencing Technology Awards created in 2004 by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) (NIH 2004)) there wouldn’t have been such a rapid development in next-generation sequencing (NGS) approaches and the cost of whole genome sequencing would not have dropped as quickly as it has (see Mardis 2011 for a review of the development of NGS). And these improvements in the sequencing technology had further consequences, for example allowing scientists to sample DNA in different ways and from different sources, as new sequencing methods could process more DNA material more quickly and work with less starting material. This, finally, made possible whole new sub-disciplines, such as metagenomics (see  Section 3.2).