Human Genome Project history 4: Enter the Wellcome Trust 28/2/01. By Georgina Ferry In 1993, with US entrepreneurs attempting to headhunt John Sulston and Bob Waterston, potentially undermining the Human Genome Project, the Wellcome Trust stepped in to fund a new sequencing institute, the Sanger Centre.

"As clearly the world's most successful [genome] sequencers, John's and Bob's talents soon came to the notice of American venture capitalist Frederick Bourke," says James Watson. "He and Leroy Hood had considered forming a private company, based in Seattle, to sequence the human genome. Through patenting key genes they hoped to effectively dominate the commercial exploitation of the human genome.

"When I learned that Bourke was trying to move Waterston and Sulston to Seattle, I worried that the NIH might lose its most successful genome-sequencing effort, and the UK government might abandon large-scale genome research. The Genome Project would then lose the great intellectual resources nurtured by the MRC at the LMB.

"I knew that John Sulston would prefer to stay in Cambridge, but he was dependent on procuring committed funding from a UK source."

It was at this point that the Wellcome Trust, which had recently become one of the richest sources of charitable funding in the world, came into the picture. Following an approach to the Trust by Aaron Klug (then Director of the LMB) and Dai Rees (Chief Executive of the MRC), John Sulston and a hand-picked team applied for funding to establish a sequencing operation that would complete the work on the worm (funded by the MRC) and on other model organisms such as yeast, and begin the task of sequencing the human genome.

The Trust, then led by Dr (now Dame) Bridget Ogilvie, recognised the importance of this scientific endeavour, and agreed to make an award to establish a major genome sequencing centre at Hinxton, near Cambridge.

The Sanger Centre was officially opened in temporary laboratories (soon to be replaced by a state-of-the-art modern campus) in 1993. It quickly established itself as a world-leading institution, playing a key role in the completion of the yeast genome in 1996, the C. elegans genome in 1998, and the first complete human chromosome, chromosome 22, in 1999.