Mol Syst Biol. 9: 642 ‘Systems Technologies’ are increasingly potent drivers of biological research. Molecular Systems Biology will be illustrating this evolution with a new Reviews Series highlighting key technologies in systems medicine, genome‐scale, computational, quantitative and synthetic biology. The series is launched with a review from the Snyder group on reading human omes (Soon et al , 2013) and a companion review on writing genomes from Harvard's Wyss Institute (Esvelt and Wang, 2013). Exponential improvement in reading and writing technologies (Carr and Church, 2009) (1.5‐fold/year since 1960s, 6‐fold per year since 2005) created a series of breakthroughs: The first genome read was MS2 in 1976 (phiX in 1977); first written was hepatitis C virus in 2000 (Blight et al, 2000) (polio in 2002). The first bacterial genome read was Helicobacter in 1994 ( Haemophilus in 1995). The first genome transplanted from in vitro DNA into radically foreign cytoplasm was Synechocystis into Bacillus in 2005 (then Mycoplasma mycoides into similar cytoplasm in 2007). Significantly, so far, no vertebrate genome has been fully read, due to repetitive regions, and no new organism function has been achieved by genome‐scale writing. We expect to see breakthroughs on both fronts in 2013. The first widely used genetic engineering vector was pBR322, constructed and sequenced 1977‐1978, parts of which are still present in modern vectors. This enabled dissection of previously recalcitrant biological systems via pure …