In an article in the upcoming issue of Scientific American, NHGRI's Francis Collins and NCI's Anna Barker offer an explanation of The Cancer Genome Atlas for civilians. They discuss why it's important, as well as what has to go into it to get worthwhile results. "When applied to the 50 most common types of cancer, this effort could ultimately prove to be the equivalent of more than 10,000 Human Genome Projects in terms of the sheer volume of DNA to be sequenced," according to the authors.