Most of the people interviewed in that video are program officers/administrators at the NHGRI (an institute of the NIH) who oversaw the ENCODE project. They weren't researchers who did the work. The mission of the NIH is human health, so anything funded by them has to have a biomedical implication somewhere down the line.
I guarantee that the real impetus for the project in the researchers' eyes is to understand how an identical* instruction manual (ie., genome sequence) in every cell can give rise to a plethora of cells that do very different things to make a functioning dynamic human. In other words, for the most part, it appears that there's the sequence information and then there's how you use it. ENCODE (and modENCODE) are about how you use it.
fyi: I'm a researcher in the modENCODE consortium, a sister project to ENCODE, aimed at characterizing functional regions of DNA in two model organisms, a small worm and the fly. My PhD advisor was funded by ENCODE as well. I obviously find this stuff fascinating and important.
I guarantee that the real impetus for the project in the researchers' eyes is to understand how an identical* instruction manual (ie., genome sequence) in every cell can give rise to a plethora of cells that do very different things to make a functioning dynamic human. In other words, for the most part, it appears that there's the sequence information and then there's how you use it. ENCODE (and modENCODE) are about how you use it.
fyi: I'm a researcher in the modENCODE consortium, a sister project to ENCODE, aimed at characterizing functional regions of DNA in two model organisms, a small worm and the fly. My PhD advisor was funded by ENCODE as well. I obviously find this stuff fascinating and important.