The Human Genome Project

By the late 1980s biologists could read short stretches of DNA, laboriously and at great expense, and a few of them began arguing that the entire human sequence should simply be read from end to end and given away. The proposal was contentious. Critics called it a fishing expedition that would swallow the budgets of investigator-driven biology to produce a catalog nobody knew how to use. Supporters answered that the sequence was infrastructure, like a map or a telescope, and that everything downstream would be cheaper and faster once it existed.

The Human Genome Project launched in October 1990 as a public consortium funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy, with James Watson as its first director and Francis Collins taking over in 1993. Laboratories in the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and China divided up the chromosomes among them. In 1996 the consortium adopted the Bermuda Principles, committing to release every new sequence into a free public database within twenty-four hours — a decision that kept the raw human sequence permanently out of private hands.

In 1998 Craig Venter announced that his new company, Celera Genomics, would do the same job faster and cheaper using a shotgun method that shredded the genome and reassembled it computationally, and would sell subscription access to the result. The race that followed was bitter and productive, each side accusing the other of bad science and bad faith while both accelerated. Politics ended it before either finished. On June 26, 2000, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair announced a joint draft from the White House, with Collins and Venter standing side by side. The truce was largely symbolic, and the two papers appeared separately in 2001.

The finished sequence was declared complete in April 2003 at a public cost of roughly two point seven billion dollars. It ran to about three billion base pairs and something near twenty thousand protein-coding genes — a startlingly low number, fewer than some plants, which demolished the assumption that human complexity came from sheer gene count. The medical payoff arrived more slowly than promised. Sequencing fell from billions of dollars to a few hundred, transforming cancer diagnosis, rare-disease hunting, and ancestry testing, but common diseases turned out to involve thousands of tiny effects rather than single findable culprits. The map proved easier to make than to read.