"For all its practical value, sequencing in itself offers little advance in understanding how the genome – or life itself – works. As the veteran molecular biologist Sydney Brenner wrote in 2010, the comparison with the Apollo programme turns out to be ‘literally correct’:

because sending a man to the moon is easy; it’s getting him back that is difficult and expensive. Today the human genome sequence is, so to speak, stranded on a metaphorical moon and it is our task to bring it back to Earth and give it the life it deserves."

https://aeon.co/essays/we-need-new-metaphors-that-put-life-at-the-centre-of-biology