 The mission to create the map of a human being, what became the International Human Genome Project, was a massive undertaking. Officially launched in 1990, this was biology's first foray into big science, a consortium of more than 2,000 researchers in 20 labs in six countries all working on one problem. The project's funding came in large part from the U.S. government through the National Institutes of Health. Somebody has to put up the front money to start big projects, and I felt it was a classic role for government, that if we got the ball rolling, that at some point, you know, the whole infrastructure of science and research and the university sector and the private sector, it would all take off. Different research teams took on separate tasks. Some were dedicated to sequencing the genomes of other species. Five were chosen, a bacterium, a yeast, a worm, a fruit fly, and another mammal, the mouse. The hope was that these would shed light on the human code. At that time, it was probably a bit of a shot in the dark. People didn't really know how much different animals would be comparable and how much you could learn from one animal, model system like the worm or the fruit fly and transfer it into humans. But it was a good guess that by finding out pieces of biological mechanism in the simpler organisms, you could learn about the human. That guess turned out to be a good one. A significant percentage of our genes are shared with other species, as much as 92% with mice. As the project marched on, some scientists thought the public consortium's protocol was too slow and too expensive. Among the critics was Craig Venter, who founded the private company Solera Genomics in 1998. Solera built the third-largest supercomputer in the world to enable a faster technique using mathematical equations to analyze the genome. The simple insight was that everybody's genome, your genome, my genome, every species has a unique mathematical solution because we're enough different. It's like if you had a New York Times and a Wall Street Journal and you shredded each of them into 50,000 pieces, mixed them all together and had those pieces read into a computer. Using our algorithms, you could totally out of that mixture reassemble the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Solera's race to be the first to sequence the genome, a healthy competition that sped up the process. But the work was also accelerated by a commitment made right from the start by the International Human Genome Project to freely share data on a daily basis. It's a very good thing that the genome project was delivered in this totally open access fashion that it would have slowed things down a lot if we'd not had the ability to make everybody with a good idea to start working on it right away. On June 26, 2000, much earlier than expected, the world celebrated the completion of the first draft of the human genome sequence. Without a doubt, this is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind. 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. And Lewis and Clark found a lot of other interesting things along the way. We needed to map America in the same way we need to map the human body. And the genome is our map of life.