Agreed. While I think what ENCODE is doing is important, I feel that they oversold the value of their work. In my opinion, they obviously wanted to ensure continued funding.
It is not a bad thing that every once in a recession less fruitful areas of research are trimmed from funding to make room for more important work. To often scientist lose sight of why their research is important, and forget about trying to solve real problems. That said, too much money is poured into military research and not enough into basic science, which is what pays off in the long run.
This is the basic science that pays off in the long run. You can't just turn biomedical science projects on and off. It takes time and investment to develop the techniques and technologies to do this work, to gather the samples, and ensure data quality across the project labs. During the time that the ENCODE project was funded, the technology for doing the types of experiments to get this kind of data advanced many times. We are now talking realistically about personal genomics and the $1000 genome; at the project start we were still celebrating the 3-billion-dollar genome sequence.
It is not a bad thing that every once in a recession less fruitful areas of research are trimmed from funding to make room for more important work. To often scientist lose sight of why their research is important, and forget about trying to solve real problems. That said, too much money is poured into military research and not enough into basic science, which is what pays off in the long run.