Playing Together Nicely

Abstract

Back in 1987, there was a tiny line item in Reagan’s budget submission to Congress about a scientific project that most people had never heard of. Since the budget passed both houses, by 1990 the Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health had a memorandum of understanding and had begun the project to map the human genome. It was research on a massive scale and to date the largest collaborative biological project in the world. Even with several government departments involved, plus universities around the world, everyone assumed it would take 15 years. Within a decade, the researchers had a working draft of the genome, and three years later they had a pretty decent map. By 2006, they had sequenced the last chromosome (though 8 percent of the genome is still unsequenced at this writing).