Throughout the early years of advocacy for the HGP (mid- to late 1980s) perhaps 80% of biologists were against it, as was the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The naysayers argued that big science is bad science because it diverts resources from the ‘real’ small science (such as single investigator science) that the genome is mostly junk that would not be worth sequencing that we were not ready to undertake such a complex project and should wait until the technology was adequate for the task and that mapping and sequencing the genome was a routine and monotonous task that would not attract appropriate scientific talent. However, there was controversy as to whether it was a good idea, with six of those assembled declaring themselves for the project, six against (and those against felt very strongly). The meeting concluded that the project was technically possible, although very challenging. In May 1985 a meeting focused entirely on the HGP was held, with Robert Sinsheimer, the Chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), assembling 12 experts to debate the merits of this potential project. The idea of the HGP was first publicly advocated by Renato Dulbecco in an article published in 1984, in which he argued that knowing the human genome sequence would facilitate an understanding of cancer. ![]() The Human Genome Project (HGP) has profoundly changed biology and is rapidly catalyzing a transformation of medicine. The Human Genome Project has inspired subsequent large-scale data acquisition initiatives such as the International HapMap Project, 1000 Genomes, and The Cancer Genome Atlas, as well as the recently announced Human Brain Project and the emerging Human Proteome Project. Moreover, deeper knowledge of human sequence variation has begun to alter the practice of medicine. The genome sequences of microbes, plants and animals have revolutionized many fields of science, including microbiology, virology, infectious disease and plant biology. It established an open approach to data sharing and open-source software, thereby making the data resulting from the project accessible to all. In this article, we discuss the ways in which this ambitious endeavor led to the development of novel technologies and analytical tools, and how it brought the expertise of engineers, computer scientists and mathematicians together with biologists. The project exemplifies the power, necessity and success of large, integrated, cross-disciplinary efforts - so-called ‘big science’ - directed towards complex major objectives. The Human Genome Project has transformed biology through its integrated big science approach to deciphering a reference human genome sequence along with the complete sequences of key model organisms.
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