 If you look at what Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark out to do, to map the way from the known America all the way to the Pacific, in the same way we need to map the human body. And the genome is our map of life. The genome, it's like a GPS. At the location where you're going in, the GPS tells you how to get there. It's very similar for genomics, right? We've now got a common set of landmarks that we can use to understand the biology of how different organisms are different from one another. I think what's really happened is we've been walking around on the ground of a new continent and then finally we can go up to the top of a mountain and look out over the whole vista. There were regions that were the Great Plains and Grand Canyons. There were regions that were New York City or perhaps fly in a plane at 20,000 feet and begin to see the big picture. I suppose for me the most shocking thing about the human genome sequence was how totally varied it was. There were dense urban neighborhoods, so to speak, with genes cheek to jowl. And there were regions of millions and millions of DNA letters with no apparent gene living in them. You might have thought the way to want a genome would be kind of have a uniform zoning code for the whole genome, but it was anything but. There actually are patterns in your DNA, just like stripes or gold or plant or polka dot. Our DNA comes with these gorgeous patterns in it that knock your socks off. Genome is this amazing diversity. Every letter in the human genome has a story. Sometimes it's a story about deep evolution. Sometimes it's a story about history. Sometimes it's a story about medicine. It's an amazing set of stories and so no one story is what excites me about the human genome. It's realizing you're having in front of you a book of three billion stories.