Thirteen years of international science produced a draft of all three billion chemical letters of human DNA, announced at the White House in June 2000. A publicly funded consortium spanning six countries raced a private competitor, Celera, over whether the sequence should be free or owned. The genome founded genomics and crashed the cost of reading DNA. It also humbled its authors: humans carry only around twenty thousand protein-coding genes, fewer than some plants, and the genome proved far harder to interpret than to spell. Lasting questions about genetic privacy and the patenting of human genes arrived with the sequence.
When the working draft of the human genome was announced at the White House in June 2000, President Bill Clinton called it 'the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind' and said scientists were now learning 'the language in which God created life.' The reference texts ran to about three billion letters, and the people who built it spoke of reading the 'book of life.' The promise carried in that phrase was enormous: that to spell out a human being letter by letter was to understand one, and soon to cure one. The spelling turned out to be the easy part. When the sequence was essentially finished in 2003, it held surprises that humbled its authors. Humans carried only around twenty thousand protein-coding genes, fewer than some plants, and most of the genome was not genes at all. Vast stretches once dismissed as useless 'junk' were quietly running the show. Reading the letters did not, by itself, cure disease or explain human nature, because biology proved far more tangled than a printed text. The genome was real and it was a triumph. It was also a beginning that its founders had sold as an ending.