 My name is Elka Jordan. I was the deputy director of MHGRI when I retired. The only thing I could think of is that I had a very inspiring professor at college who was a geneticist, a cytogeneticist, and really got me interested. I was just fascinated. This was around the time that Crick and Watson discovered the structure of DNA. It was very primitive stuff, but that really led me to go into that field. The university was Goucha College and the professor was Helen Krause. Have you heard of her? No. She worked on cytogenetics in flies. She had a special fly that she liked, I think, a sciara. It was called, but she taught us widely about genetics. She was just thrilled and excited about it and had us read McClintock's papers on jumping genes. So I had an early introduction to some of the mysteries of genetics. Well, there were a lot less buildings. When I go there now I have a hard time finding my way about it. I was in the biology department, which was a mishmash, well not a mishmash, but contained every kind of biology from biochemistry, which was rather famous, the McCallum Pratt Institute, and all the way up to classical genetics on the top floor. The biochemists were on the bottom and geneticists were at the top, which didn't mean the geneticists were more regarded. I think the biochemists were held sway. And the term molecular biology hadn't even been invented yet. We talked about biochemical genetics. And then as I progressed in my career, it became molecular biology. There was another controversial event, and at the time I had no idea what it would lead to, but it is perfectly logical to connect it with the human genome project. Well, GenBank was just an attempt to collect all sequence data in one place so that they would be accessible. And it was controversial because at that time people were just getting used to desktop computers, and they were developing their own databases, and they really just wanted to keep them in their lab, the sequences they generated. And so there were lots of little collections about all done differently, and the visionary folks thought that we should coalesce them all in a central national facility that everybody could get access to, but other people felt that, no, everybody would have it on their desktop and it wouldn't really be a big deal and it was not necessary to have a big centralized effort. Well, in a way, both were right. Everybody does have it on their desktop. They have it on their little iPad or whatever, because you can download, and computers have become much, much more powerful. So that was in the era when the desktop was just becoming available. So the centralized folks went out and we went through some tribulations with contractors who were not performing as well as we had hoped. And then after a while, NLM took over and the whole thing blossomed into a whole series of databases, and they really sort of run the market now. It wasn't there very long. They had a program called the Virus Cancer Program. At the time it was believed that if you've just found the right virus, you could understand what caused cancer. Well, it was partially true. There are some viruses that caused cancer, but it was not nearly as, and they're not the viruses that they were studying. It's mostly DNA viruses, and they were studying RNA viruses, which they thought were the key to everything. So I sort of had an administrative role there. I never worked in the field. I did learn a lot about it, which was helpful, because as a molecular biologist, I was working on bacteria, and this introduced me to mammalian systems and the more complex biological systems. Well, I worked in the genetics program. I was ruled and recruited by Fred Bergman, who was the director of the genetics program, and I came to NIH through a program called the Grants Associates Program, which at that time, NIH had difficulty recruiting people. Can you imagine? Because academia was more attractive. This program was supposed to convert people from academia into administrators for grants. And most of the time, the people who came through were not molecular biologists. I was sort of a rare species, and Fred Bergman became aware of that. There was some linkages why he knew of my existence. And so he recruited me into the genetics program where I was able to manage grants that really dealt with genetics. Well, at that time, the theory was that you wanted to hire generalists. That managing a grants program required many skills, but that the science was somewhat adaptable. That has since kind of gone by the wayside. Now the focus in the institutes is more on getting specialists in the area to handle the grants. So that was one reason maybe why the program eventually was ended. Another reason was that people didn't have trouble hiring anymore. Well, I had moved on in NIGMS. By that time, I was associate director for program activities, I think was the title. So it was more managerial position and less direct handling of grants. But nevertheless, somehow I was, well, because of my work in genetics and then this associate director position, my name was very well known in the community because I put my name on a lot of documents, grant award and such. And from my time in research, people in my field knew of me. I was not a brilliant scientist, but there were not that many of us and not that many women. So my name was pretty well known. And when Weingarten was persuaded to establish the office of genome research, and Watson agreed to come and be teaching ahead of it, they needed some staff. So I'm told people went to Weingarten and said, you have to hire Elka Jordan or this will not work. And I think that was just because the community that was agitating for it knew me. They couldn't possibly know everybody at NIH. So they had some comfort in knowing I was one of them. So that's how it happened. I got this call from Weingarten. Do you want to come over and do this? And I thought, oh my gosh. Nobody knew whether this would last, whether we would ever get money and whether the whole thing would work out. I know that the community was kind of looking to NRGMS to do a lot of these things, just like GenBag, which NRGMS very, very, very reluctantly agreed to coordinate. And initially, in fact, we got contributions from all kinds of people to fund GenBag because Ruth Kerstein didn't want to divert money from grants. So the community was sort of looking to NRGMS. Here's this new idea and I did have some chats with people like David Botstein but they realized that NRGMS wasn't going to pick up the ball. They felt they'd done as much as they could with GenBag. So the community next tried at a higher level and in fact somehow came to the conclusion that it was best to do it separate from any institute and give it its own identity. Because I guess they were afraid the institutes might corrupt it into something else. So I think that went on for quite some time that they just didn't get a positive response from their knowledge. And I don't know how Wine Gardens almost finally twisted to say yes. Well, I thought he was probably the best person at that point in time, not in the long run, but he had tremendous reputation. People listened to him, the community had confidence in him. So who else could have done it? And he was willing and that's always the other part. People are not always at a stage in life where they can just pick up and go. It's somewhat amazing what an influence he had on people, how he was able to persuade people to his point of view. By phone he called frequently and Zinda called frequently too. Watson appointed Zinda the chair of his advisory committee. So both of them were on the phone a lot and occasionally Watson came in. Honestly, I don't remember these conversations except when the secretary said, Dr. Watson saw the phone and he dropped everything and talked to him. And same with Zinda, he was often just venting his frustrations. About? Watson. He's called after you and given this talk and got everybody rattled and upset and now I have to go calm things down. Something like that. Well, Mark Guy, I met it in IGMS. And I focused on him to take with me when I went to the Office of Human Genome Research because he actually had worked in the technology. I don't know if he actually did sequencing of any sort, but he was familiar with the current technology. And I felt I needed that because I'd been out of research for some time. And I left before the recombinant DNA revolution. So I was really pretty ancient, science-wise. And I thought he would compliment me nicely. He had not been in IGMS very long. So his science was recent and he still had a lot of career open to him. But took some persuasion. He was very reluctant at first. You know, it was a very iffy sort of thing to do to go to this office and didn't have its own budget yet. Hopefully would have some budget in the future. Or might disappear in a year or two. And Mark had only just recently come to IGMS. So I guess he didn't. And I think wherever he was working had folded or something. So he wanted some stability and not go off on another rash tangent. But he finally decided to come anyway. He was the best from the IGMS staff. I didn't really look all over NIH. But the chances of somebody really being familiar with that area in another institute were pretty remote. Did you read the book that NIH wrote about her? Yeah. It got her pretty right. I could really see her and hear her. Because they took all the stories that she told that people repeated to them and put them in this book. So it gave a very good picture of the person. It's somewhat idealized. She was very devoted to an IGMS. And basic research, which was sort of amazing because that's not the way she came. It was not the field she was working in. But she sort of became the voice for basic research and individual research grounds. And she did not want having finally gotten an IGMS around to getting rid of some of the other fluff that had around the edges. She was not about to let it again degenerate to these other areas that were less central to the mission. So I think that's why she resisted all these new efforts like GenBank or Genome Project. And the community that was promoting them felt that there was a lot of resistance there. So that's why they turned to other avenues. And it was very effective at promoting basic research to Congress and within the department. And IGMS did well during her era. No, I don't know that. I think it was a gradual process as it became more accepted generally and more successful. And that's what, in my mind, that's what brought the community around, which was very resistant to the Genome Project. As soon as data flowed that they could use, it flipped the opinion completely. So once we put out sequences and people found them to be useful, then they couldn't wait to get more. And the whole issue of this is a bad idea just vanished. The same with GenBank, once people saw it and started using it, the criticism died away. A little later, she had worked at NSF, right? And then she came to IGMS and Mark knew her. I can't remember exactly why. Were they in the genetics program together? Anyway, he brought her to my attention and thought that she would be willing to move another IGMS. And that seemed to work out well. Betty Graham, I knew, she was also in this grants associate program to train scientists to be managers way back, and we all sort of knew of each other. And I thought that she might be interested in a new situation. She was in the I Institute, I think. And I wanted a variety of people, not just NRGMS types. So we recruited Betty. Craig Venda, of course, had a lot to do with that. And he and Healy somehow hit it off and came up, I don't know who came up with what, but somehow this idea emerged that if we patented sequences, the NIH could become rich. That's the way it appeared to us. There was a way of amplifying the NIH budget. So Watson thought that was nutty, and I think he's been proven right. And he was very outspoken about it, as he always is. There was this famous hearing we had on the Hill. I don't remember who was hearing. Do you remember what Senator or... I think it was Domenici. It was Domenici. Anyway, Craig was going on about his stuff and Watson made some rude remark. That was sort of the end of that. So then that was the beginning of the end for Watson at NIH. Well, I think the conflict of interest issue was used as an excuse, but she really wanted to get rid of him. He probably officially resigned, but he was pushed. He wasn't quite ready to go yet. I don't think he planned to stay around forever, but the timing was pushed up. She did... I must grant that to her. She did recognize that this was a very valuable program and the community was behind it. So she didn't try to kill it, which she could have tried to do. He somehow interacted with us. He wanted some funding. Well, that's usually why people came to us. He wanted funding for his projects. I don't remember now whether we ever gave him any or not, but that's somewhere in the record. And then the next stage, he had this conversation with Healy about patenting. So then he was very much on our minds. And then he left NIH to start his company. His Tiger. Venter wasn't recognized or didn't feel recognized by his institute. And so this was the early stage where we were getting, recruiting people to participate in the genome project. And you didn't yet know who was going to come out. Big winners, but everybody was looking to play a role. Brilliant. Well, you have to put yourself back in that time when one of the groups attacking the genome project were the people concerned about the ethics. They saw us using the information to breed humans and engineer humans and do all kinds of unethical things, which were extremely remote from what the genome project was really about. But that was the public discussion at the time. That was the tone of the discussion. And by making it an official part of the discussion, I think Watson quelled a lot of that. First of all, it gave those people who were more moderate a chance to get some facts out. I started going to meetings, constantly giving talks, writing papers, being interviewed and putting a little more factual basis to the discussion, clarifying what we were and what we weren't doing. It, I think, gave people some sense of comfort that it was being looked at and someone was working on it. And, you know, nowadays having an LC program when you're starting something that's going to have a lot of social impact, it's sort of the norm. Even when I went to the foundation for NIH and we were studying grand challenges, in very early on, we established a little LC group too. So I think it was, that's what, you know, with all this honoring as a peculiarities, Watson does have vision. What LC did was to give legitimacy to the field, provided some funding to people who could establish themselves. And so the whole thing became, achieved a more solid grounding. But they provided an outlet for those kinds of discussions in a controlled, reproducible kind of environment. Not just the press writing pieces in the newspapers, but, you know, scholarly, serious thinking about the issues. She was a very good public face to the whole issue. She was great at giving interviews and speaking and, you know, just generally promoting a sane discussion of LC issues and the benefits of the genome project. Because, you know, while the public was complaining, they were also going to hopefully benefit from having this research go forward. So she was very effective at that. I remember some of our advisory committee meetings with press and photographers and so forth were present, and she would be surrounded by a swarm of people wanting to talk to her. She had a lot of charisma. At the beginning, he got the whole thing rolling. He was an academic, and so he gave a kind of legitimacy to the effort of the people in academia. They felt they had someone they could talk to who could understand them, and he did understand them. Later, he was less oriented, let's say, towards practical results. And that's one reason why he left and went back to academia. Especially when Francis came in, and I think he was looking for, what have you done for me lately? We need some concrete results. We don't just need scholarship, although I think initially having some good scholarship was very beneficial. But Francis was more of a practical results type of person. Well, before he came, the community rallied around us. So during the time when Goddusman was acting, because he wasn't at left and healing was still around. So I would get calls from time to time that they were looking around for someone who could take over, that they could persuade Healy who would be the right candidate in a subtle way because it was... I think they thought if they directly went into healing and said, this is your man or your woman, that would never work. So it had to be done by indirection. And there was a plot on how this would be done. And Francis had one of our genetic centers. So we knew of him. We knew what kind of person he was, what kind of research he did, and so forth. And he was riding on a high and discovered which gene was it, the CF gene. So that all seemed very compatible. And when Healy actually offered him the job, everybody was happy that it worked out. And he came in. And one of the dramatic changes that brought is that the intramural program was started, and it gave the center a much bigger presence than the NIH environment. And a lot of new people coming in. So when Francis first came, establishing the intramural program was really sort of the major issue on the table for the center at that time, center. For us to... Having an intramural program, first of all, gave us a kind of legitimacy on the NIH campus that we didn't have before. NIGMS doesn't have an intramural program, and it sort of feels like it's missing an arm or something. It's not in the thick of some of the issues that concern NIH. But also bringing in the intramural program brought in expertise that wasn't on the NIH campus. And so, as expertise was shared through collaboration or otherwise, the intramural program, as I see it, and I wasn't in it, I was just watching from outside, became very integrated into the rest of the NIH intramural program and provided something of value. NISC is a very concrete example, but I think it was in subtle as well as not so subtle ways. It changed the tenor in the intramural program, sort of brought them into the modern era in some areas. Well, there were some developments in mapping, and there were also developments in sequencing before the sequence really began to appear in huge amounts. That was a period when I think those Bermuda conferences were doing that period, weren't they, when the Bermuda principles were announced. So there was a lot of back and forth behind that. The British were very strong in promoting free access and early access, and they kept pushing us further and further in their direction. The DOE was also very concerned about publishing as soon as possible. The NIH community was a little more reluctant because they weren't used to it. So, you know, that was a step-by-step process. It wasn't as if it was all suddenly full blown and everybody had total agreement on how it should be worded, went through many stages. The mapping also made progress. I was just thinking about that this morning as I was reviewing your question. When we started, there were all these chromosome groups, one for most chromosomes, trying to map that chromosome, arduously and meticulously. And then, what was his name? Weissenbach in France. Weissenbach. Jean Weissenbach. Did a map of the whole genome, somewhat crude map, but nevertheless he got the whole thing by using large-scale methods. And that, I think, really changed the thinking of many people. Eric Lander was thinking that way before Weissenbach even published his map, I believe, but he didn't have many people following him. So, you know, when we started the Genome Project, it was kind of a cottage industry. There was a great deal of emphasis on getting everything 100% right. And the change in thinking that Weissenbach's map produced was that there's another way of getting at it, which is to do the whole thing and fill in the gaps later. Some of it will be perfect, some of it will be less perfect, but you can then work on the gaps rather than starting at one end or the other, and then going to the other end. Yeah, well, there are many areas of conflict. I do think that the Genome Project showed that these large-scale automated approaches are valid in biology, valid and valuable in biology as well. Biologists weren't used to thinking that way. What was the other side of my thought? Well, so we had to get biologists to accept that kind of an approach. And then there was the other tension about perfection. The fear articulated mostly by Maynard Olsen that we would produce junk. We didn't have very high standards of quality. And so we had to learn, the community had to learn how to balance those two issues and have good quality, but also speed and where was the proper balance between those two. And that's towards the end when there was several years of debate about when shall we say we're finished and what does finished mean because everybody knew it would not be every single base pair. Maybe at the beginning people thought it would be, but with the heterochromatism being sort of difficult to work with, people soon realized that it wasn't going to be 100% of every base pair perfectly situated. So those were a lot of tensions that a lot of time was spent on dealing with those issues and getting some kind of consensus that people would support. Yes and no. There was, you know, the Lander versus Olsen. Olsen, we need very high standards. Lander, we need to automate and do large scale. We'll get there faster. Tension was always there, but there was also a lot of skepticism that the Craig-Venter kind of approach would be possible. I mean, you have to give it to Craig. I tried something that seemed impossible to a lot of people and found that it did work. And that, you know, when that became evident, it kind of changed people's thinking about this whole issue. I don't really know. My source was David Botstein. You familiar with him? He talked to me periodically to give me a heads up about what was happening. But I don't think he was necessarily the head of the group. I don't know what probably was involved with Zinda. And I don't know that Eric Lander, whether he was part of the group or not. But, you know, I think the big names in the field were probably communicating. Francis was thought to be available because he had just gotten a divorce and they thought he might be willing to move somewhere else and change careers. And that worked out. So you'd have to talk to them. I really don't know except the little tidbits I got. And also it was known that somehow Healy had taken to him. They had met. And that was important. I mean, if she was allergic to the person it wasn't going to work. Well, she seemed to me to be on a different planet. Communication with her was very difficult. For a while there we were called into our office quite a few times to explain this or that or read the riot app. And she just seemed to be, you know, it was like she was circling up there and we were circling here and we just didn't know how to make the connection. I remember one meeting where I don't remember what the issue was or why Eric Youngs had written something in response to the issue. And she liked it. And, you know, it was a typical Eric Youngs kind of thing, sort of theoretical and academic and very good prose. And so we grabbed onto Eric and said, you know, if you two can communicate, tell us what the secret is. But I don't know that it helped. At that particular time they were communicating. She was a terribly hard worker. She read everything that went to Building One. She would take boxes of stuff home and read them overnight. And when she wasn't in town she commuted. She would have them sent to her. And, you know, I think she really absorbed all this material. But she saw it from her perspective. Very strange woman. She's a very nice, very approachable, warm, sensitive kind of person. And it seems very laid back, but accomplishes a lot while being laid back. There's a lot more to him than first meets the eye. And he's been very, in my opinion, very successful as director of intramural in a quiet sort of way, no fanfares, gets it done. Well, you have to remember Watson was part-time. His appointment was part-time. He was not physically present most of the time. So he did not involve himself at all in day-to-day things. He didn't care whom we hired or anything. He somehow trusted us to make it all work out or didn't care because he wasn't going to be around. I don't know. But we had a lot of freedom. I mean, the goals were clear, but how to get there, whom to hire and so forth. Even grant awards. He didn't study in detail how much people got and so forth. The internal workings of NIH, he just wasn't interested in the whole process. When Francis came, he was full-time. He was here physically. So he, being the kind of person he is, he got himself up on all the aspects of being a government employee and running a government program. At first, both he and the other intramural investigators that he hired were somewhat shocked by the life of a federal employee and all the restrictions and rules that you had to follow. But he learned to use them to his advantage. As most people do, we'll stick around. So, yeah, the two styles couldn't be more different. Both were very good at getting their message across and very good at promoting the genome project, but in a different style. The first time I saw him was at that famous ALE conference. He was sort of a young and upcoming scientist who spoke up quite a bit and who clearly had very good ideas. Everybody said, who's Eric? He's too young to be having such a big voice and things. So, but he lived up to his reputation. He, I think, was very much a confidant of Francis Collins. Confidant also persuader to his points of view. He was, in terms of the large-scale approaches, he was very much ahead of the rest of the field trying to bring them along. And, of course, his center produced a huge chunk of the final sequence. He was very effective in that. So, I see him as a very, very key person in achieving the public sequence. Eric has worked in many fields and has always been successful. So, I would say that implementing the large-scale approach and really making it work and being able to communicate with the people from all the different fields that you have to bring together to make that happen was a major contribution that he made that was distinct from what the other centers did. And just intellectually, he dominates any group. We never put him on our advisory council or advisory committee because he was so dominant and he had the largest chunk of money and we felt it would look like too much inbreeding. But he was on the director's advisory committee. It was just amazing. No matter what topic came up, he had wise things to say. So, he's just extremely smart. Yeah, he did get a genius award so I guess he's a certified genius. I'm sure he's a genius. And he's very articulate too. Not only did he contribute on any topic but he was able to encapsulate what the issue was and sort of clearly lay out the facts so that anybody could follow it. He really had a gift for that. Not much of a collaboration. Unless you, you know, one-way collaboration and that FENTA had all our information as well. The real issue that galvanized people was the availability of the sequence. Our group felt very strongly to a man, I would say, to a woman that it must be public and readily accessible by everybody but that was the way science would progress most effectively. Whereas FENTA had this patenting idea and making access to the sequence depending on money or whatever. So, that was considered a major threat that if he succeeded in that. And that really, that was what the race was about. What is his scientific legacy? He's not done. He keeps coming up with these radical ideas. But as far as the genome, I think showing that the whole genome approach, given the right circumstances, can work and it has been adopted. So, that is definitely a contribution. And without him we would have got there but maybe not at the same time. I think in due course the whole genome approach would have emerged anyway which is true of most scientific discoveries. They would have, when you're the historian, but my impression is that sooner or later people would have got it. So, I think we would have had that. Maybe Eric Lander would have shown it. Well, as I said earlier, journalists are always looking for some controversy to give their story a little oomph. But I sat here watching the process from the inside. And there was a lot of tension those last two or three years. Not all of it made it into the public press. Some of the journalism was sort of what we would call bias towards Venta saying, you know, why is the government trying to beat this poor private sector person who's trying to reach the same objective? And we constantly had to explain, and Francis was good at that, that we had somewhat different objectives and it was important for us to achieve ours, which was making it public. By the way, while we're on that topic of making public, I do think that is another major, besides Elsie and a few other things, another major conceptual contribution of the Genome Project, that sharing the data as quickly as possible is to the benefit of all. That was not the general mindset at the time. The ex-worm people, Salston and Waterston, were very strong proponents of that. The British and the Wellcome Trust were just adamant, and they pushed it as far as they could. It was not the norm at NIH. People felt they had a right to data they produced, to mine it and publish before they shared it with anybody else. So it was true in the worm group, but it was not universal in the field. But I think even that idea of making data freely available is now spreading into other fields where it wasn't done before, like even clinical trials. Well, there was a need for people to publish something, to have papers, to build their resumes. And so they felt they should have some period of time at least. To do that before the rest of the world could get at the data. And that's why we started out with a six-month period. I think it shrunk later on as technology improved. Most scientists would have liked to have more time, but they seemed to have survived. Not aware of any group in particular. But during my stay here at NIH, I've been present at many discussions about this whole issue of when to release data. It's now common for journals to require data deposition before something is published. That was another agonizing multi-year effort to reach that point. And to reach the point of making journals some of the responsibility for getting data out, they didn't want to do that at all. So even back when I was in NIGMS, we were fighting those kinds of battles. So I would say it was pretty pervasive to try and hold on to your data. Well, Ari certainly did act as intermediary. Got Salera and the public project to talk to each other and arrive at some sort of agreement. How to describe the DOE role? They were actually early proponents of data sharing and sort of pushed us at NIH. We didn't have any policy as an institution about data sharing. I mean, you, from our relationships with OMB, that getting anything in that area officially changed would be extremely difficult and time-consuming. Anything, any change you made to the application, the NIH application, had to go through OMB and it was a quagmire. So we came up with a way to accommodate by just asking investigators to describe what they would do and telling them that if that was not part of their priority score, but if we found it deficient, we would negotiate a better policy with them if an award was to be made. So we weren't making a rule as to what they should do, but we were telling them they had to tell us and then we would react to what they told us. And that sort of went under the radar. Nobody complained, so we kept doing it. And it's also now a way of behaving that's become accepted in other areas. And of course the investigators knew what the standard, what the official standard, what the G5 was saying and what was published and so forth. And so they knew what policy we were looking for. So DOE did have an influence there. We otherwise might not have instituted this policy until later. Working with DOE was interesting because their culture is so totally different. Whether it's the difference between biology and engineering or what it is, I don't know. But the way the department operates, you'd think it was a different government. And the reasons for it are probably that they report to different committees in Congress. The way they work with OMB is totally different from what NIH does because NIH, all the institutes go directly to Congress for their budget negotiation whereas in DOE it's all centralized. Awards are all centralized. They seemed very rigid. They had deadlines, the last grant they could make or they called them all contracts would be months before the end of the fiscal year whereas we could make a grant at the very last minute in the fiscal year. So there were all these things that had to somehow be made to mesh so that we could collaborate on things. And of course they could bring expertise in engineering and physics and mathematics and computer science to the table from their intramural labs that we didn't have as readily available. So for certain areas that we were having meetings on and discussions, they could bring in people. Sometimes it's difficult to work with these people because they were living in a different world but still, I think they did have an impact in enriching and broadening the discussion somewhat but you're absolutely right, the final contribution was relatively minor. Well they selected themselves in a way. They wrote successful applications. Everything we did was peer reviewed. Groups that did well grew and stuck around where the others gradually died away or went on to other things. And it was this automation thing. Some labs just couldn't manage it to go up to a suitable scale and invest in the automation. Then that could have been temperament, it could have been space, it could have been just skill or whatever but they sort of selected themselves in terms of success. Now that's our center, the NIH-funded ones. The DOE pretty much stuck with their center. They had their own funding ways of doing things and the Wellcome Trust put its resources into the Sanger Center and kept them going. But they were successful. Definitely. They made a lot of intellectual contributions as well as sequins. And many of the other countries wanted to have a little chunk. They wanted to be part of it. It's amazing how once the thing became established everybody wanted to be part of it. We had delegations from France and from Japan almost annually because their government keeps changing so they had a new representative and wanted to know how they could participate and give them a spiel. Germany didn't really have a major presence in the sequencing phase of things. But initially it was important for us to include as many people as possible. There were political reasons for that bringing the community along. These people were already working in these areas and to just say everything that's going on is junk and we're going to do it completely differently would have just created even more controversy. So initially the idea was to somehow stimulate support, encourage the groups that were already mapping to contribute to the Overwall Map. And it was good. I mean it was quality control in a way because they produced very good data and if your rapid method matched their data then that was a good sign. That's when a bunch of government officials and advisors go and visit a site, a lab where some work is going on to evaluate it and try to get information that is beyond what you can get on the written application. Someone may describe a room full of apparatus as doing this and that but you don't quite get it or believe it until you actually see it and until you talk to the people working on the project in addition to the principal investigator and get a sense of their qualifications and their commitment and their skills. So we had, as things got very busy we often had reverse site visits where the leaders of a project came here and of course you couldn't see the lab but you could interrogate them and try to get a sense of their thinking whether they were really with it. It can be very valuable. Well, I can tell you every time we went to see Landa I participated a couple of times. There would be lots of skepticism and then when people got there they would just be, oh gosh, gosh, it really does work, it really does do it. So site visits can very much work in your favor but also not if you're not up to speed. Fascinating. There were conference calls, I think every week with all the G5 participants and he ran them very tightly. I think we always had an agenda, things that needed to be covered and people who were not meeting their goals they would have their goals and if they didn't meet them there was a lot of discussion about why and to fix it up and sometimes things were moved around a little bit to keep the overall effort going. It was a fascinating process. I think by personality he was able to just keep the group together and get any parties that were having falling out to smooth it over. That I attribute to personal skills of his in dealing with people and the fact that they were all going for the same goal. I mean everybody had bought into the goal so they didn't have to persuade them that we should go to this goal instead of this one. Everybody agreed on what the goal was. It was just a matter of how to get there as efficiently and as soon as possible and sometimes he would have private conversations with one or more of the investigators outside the conference call to prepare the way for things. Having a clear goal is very, very helpful even if it was not as clear as it might seem. We did not map the whole human genome or sequence or whole human genome the sequence, what was sequence of all at the time but even so it was a much more clear goal. The most research that I've been involved in was a measurable goal. The fact that it finished two years earlier depends on how you measure where your starting point is. When we had our advisory committee meetings there would be ups and downs. The downs were never going to make it especially in a reasonable time. Then there were ups when things were going well and there was a lot of optimism. I don't think there was a time point when we felt okay, this is going to work. Although in concept everybody soon believed it could be done. It was just a question of when and how much money it would take. In a sense there was always a plan B discussion if we don't get 100% it's 90% good enough and that sort of thing. Absolutely. There was a large political accomplishment because scientifically the value was incremental the more sequence you had the better. The business of whether you're finished at 100% or 98% or 95% scientifically didn't make that much difference but people were very aware of their reputation and their imposterity and the political situation and how it would be interpreted that the public project gave up at 90% because it couldn't get the rest or something like that. So yes there was a lot of political thought involved. That was sort of going on alongside all the time and Francis was very good at explaining what it would do for society. The issue for NHGRI was what do we do next? Where does this go? And there were some who felt genome project completed maybe we should disband and declare victory or Francis Collins and others promoting that it's not done I think in retrospect it is done we're now on to another phase but that really doesn't matter the fact is that the institute started branching out in more directions more clinically relevant directions mostly and you can still call it genomics because it involves genomics approaches but it's not the genome project as originally envisioned so there was a little bit of a fight over what we do next at that point. Oh I think they have lots of promise lots of new insights they have mapped into evolution of humans differences between different groups and what they might be caused by. The encode I'm not that familiar with all the things that came out of it I just occasionally read about it in science and it seems fascinating to me I mean this is the kind of information that we've been yearning for and now we can actually see it oh no considering how stuck we are in our racial backgrounds and how many wars are being fought over these differences no I think it's something to approach very cautiously and it's something that Elsie should be helping us with and they were involved in the HapMap right? I seem to remember there was an Elsie component so I'm a firm believer that real understanding will demystify a lot of things and remove problems that in the imagination seem much more complex than they really are so I'm all for shedding light on these things and maybe when we all realize that our genomes are essentially the same and there's only little bits of changes that produce the visible effect maybe that will be good for everybody oh undoubtedly eventually yeah I think also it will make the information much more widely available and by that I mean that people are actually eager to have such information in most cases that I observe the geneticists and particularly the genetics counselors were very concerned about sharing information with patients that might disturb them or worry them and now that companies offer this kind of thing by mail order Francis Collins certainly used to be extremely concerned about those kinds of developments I don't know if he still is but it seems to be much less of a problem than the geneticists imagined so I think people are eager when I talk to my friends now they're much more into the health history of their families and how that affects them they sort of bought into the idea that our genetics is deterministic and it doesn't seem to disturb them inordinately we all know that we're fated for certain things and we all know that we are more similar to other families than to other people so it's just an extension of our experience to date. Yeah, everything I would never have imagined it I was a graduate student when the what exactly was it what was it that Marshall Nienberg did polyphenylalanin production so it's how the code translated protein right? And someone predicted at that point that soon we would be able to sequence the DNA which seemed totally unbelievable at that point and we had no way of going near that even and lo and behold it happened in my lifetime sort of amazing. I feel very privileged to have had my career in science during this period because so many amazing things happened so it's very hard to actually point to one thing that stands out just the speed with which things have changed how different doing sciences nowadays doing biology, well maybe not all biology but at least this kind of biology we were working with metal loops and aga plates got a lot of information out of that and now you have all this machinery and everything's automated I sometimes wonder if I was starting now a career in this area whether I would like it or whether I would find it it's too mechanical. Oh statistics nobody in biology that I knew ever studied statistics in my day but I think it would be vital now and regardless even if you're going into clinical sciences you need statistics it's generally not valued enough and I have not studied statistics but that's one thing I'm messing with the microphone first of all all the sequence analysis it's heavily dependent on statistical approaches and as biology becomes more large scale all the way from clinical trials to sequencing you have to know statistics so I would recommend that computers know something about programming even if you don't intend to do it so you can at least talk to programmers other than that I think it's so wide open what can be done now it should be a wonderful thing to do well once its initial vision was that the program would be seated in the NIH or some agency of the government that had money but it would actually be run by an international group, advisory group called Hugo and he was trying to get the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to underwrite this Hugo which they never did there was a Hugo initially and they did have a couple of meetings where nothing happened as I recall and it was complete innocence of knowledge of how governments work the NIH wasn't going to report to some kind of international group appointed by God knows who making pronouncements about how the genome project should be managed so eventually our advisory committee and I guess maybe DOE had their committee as well sort of filled the role that was envisioned for Hugo but Hugo itself never went anywhere and it couldn't and it was obvious to us that it couldn't first of all to get a voluntary group like that to agree on anything would be extremely hard it was much easier for us because we had money to back up anything that was decided but anyway that was sort of the ideal holistic vision of scientists we run by scientists for scientists I don't know of any model like that we went to countless meetings at Howard Hughes I went with Watson and he would berate them about giving him money Cahill was his name George Cahill and it never came to anything very wisely Hughes decided not to support this crazy idea it is crazy but it was very idealistic thinking that a bunch of bureaucrats couldn't possibly manage this it had to be scientists well there were all the results of meetings which were sometimes pretty contentious and you'd spend 75% of the time thinking this is never going to work and then in the end we had to come together but scientists came to the realization they had to have some quantitative goals we had to have something measurable so the plans were made in that way which was pretty novel at least for this field and then at the next meeting we had something to measure the rigor had it's about no we haven't met the goal I think for doing the Human Genome Project itself the thing that was finished in 2002 they were invaluable because they kept everyone on their toes and they kept everybody marching to the same goal so it was a novel concept to do it that way but it seems to have worked and then even when the Genome Project was finished we still tried to do plans I'm not sure that they were nearly as successful and I don't know that they're still doing it