Completion of the Human Genome Project
The Human Genome Project announced the essential completion of the human genome sequence in April 2003, thirteen years after it began and fifty years almost to the month after Watson and Crick published the structure of DNA. It was an international public consortium — twenty centres in the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Japan and China — funded chiefly by the American government and the Wellcome Trust, and led by Francis Collins after James Watson resigned over the question of patenting genes. The project was intensely contested from 1998, when Craig Venter's private company Celera announced it would sequence the genome faster and cheaper using whole-genome shotgun sequencing rather than the consortium's slower map-based approach. The competition accelerated both and produced a joint announcement of working drafts at the White House in June 2000. The consortium's central commitment was the Bermuda Principles of 1996, under which all sequence data was released publicly within twenty-four hours, which kept the human genome out of private ownership. The findings were not what had been expected. The genome contains around 20,000 protein-coding genes rather than the 100,000 widely predicted, less than a mustard weed by some counts, and coding sequence occupies under two per cent of it. The cost was about three billion dollars. Sequencing a genome now costs a few hundred and takes a day. The medical returns arrived more slowly than promised, chiefly in cancer genomics, rare disease diagnosis and pharmacogenomics. The sequence was also not one person's: it was a composite drawn from a handful of anonymous donors. A genuinely complete, gapless human genome was published only in 2022, once long-read sequencing could handle the repetitive regions.
- Category: Cultural
