$ 700 billion will buy a lot of taq, LB, submarines, and other things

I know, my research tends to be expensive as I work on deep sea organisms and do genomics and such. But for $700 billion, a lot could get done in my work areas. Here are some things one could get for that amount of money that directly relate to my work (this was inspired by a conversation with Drew Endy Friday)

• 1,400,000 Roche 454 Sequencing Machines (for $500,000 each). If you had money for reagents, that would get you a lot of sequencing.
  
• 70 million bacterial genomes (at $10,000 each for the shotgun sequencing)
• 280,000 liters (yes that is right, liters) of Taq polymerase (at 100$/40 ul)
• 29.16 billion liters of sterilized LB broth (from Sigma at 12$/500 ml). That is one big vat of LB. It is also about 11,666 olympic swimmings pools worth of LB.
  
• 7 billion copies of my Evolution textbook
• 7 million people years of computational biologists to analyze data (at $100,000 per person year)
• 538 million open access fees for publishing in PLoS One (at $1300 each)
• 116.67 years of the National Science Foundation's Budget (at current costs of $6 billion per year)
• A fleet of 32,407 Alvin submarine replacements (at 21.6 million a pop). Think of all of the deep sea work that could be done
• Registration fees for 350 million people to go to the AGBT meeting in Marco Island
• 28 million special guest appearances by Craig Venter (assuming he charges a 25,000 speaking fee, which is probably a bit high)

So it goes. I was always thinking of writing this type of blog about the money spent on the Iraq War. But this "bailout" $$$ got me thinking again.

And please post your own lists of what else this $$$ could buy.