Human Genome Project history 1: the project begins 28/2/01. By Georgina Ferry In the late 1980s, biologists first began to entertain the idea that, given the funds and the technology, it would be possible to read the entire human genome, the three billion letters in the 'book of life'.

It was partly a question of believing it could be done - to many the task was so large as to be simply inconceivable.

One of the first to think big was Robert Sinsheimer, Chancellor of the University of California at Santa Cruz. Sinsheimer was used to raising huge sums for physics and astronomy. A molecular biologist himself, he wondered why a 'big science' approach should not also work for biology. In 1985 he brought together a group of molecular biologists to discuss his ideas.

Nothing concrete emerged immediately, but from then on more and more people began to think of a human genome project as in principle feasible. It might take 15 years and cost US$3 billion, but that sort of cost and timescale was nothing exceptional in other areas of science.

The following year a much larger conference at Santa Fe, convened by the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Health and Environmental Science (OHES), generated similar excitement. The Head of OHES, Charles de Lisi, had generous amounts of funding at his disposal, and following the conference he began to support an ambitious research programme on genome mapping and sequencing.

The same year there was a discussion at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the main funder of biomedical research in the USA, which Sir Walter Bodmer of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF) Laboratories in London was invited to chair. James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, participated in this discussion and later convened another conference at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories. "There was a convergence of people realising what you could do with the information," says Sir Walter.

Both he and Sydney Brenner, Director of the MRC’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, initially had difficulty persuading influential bodies in the UK to think big about the genome. However, Dr Brenner gained the personal support of the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, for molecular genetics research funded by the MRC to the tune of £11 million over three years from 1989.

The ICRF funded an international genome mapping meeting in London, out of which emerged the idea of an international genome database. "We needed that to take mapping to the next stage," says Sir Walter Bodmer. The Genome Database was established at Johns Hopkins University in 1990, and moved to the Bioinformatics Supercomputing Center at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto in 1999.

Meanwhile, in 1988, an international group of geneticists founded the Human Genome Organization (HUGO) in Switzerland. Largely through personal contacts between scientists looking for genetic links to disease, a number of international collaborations had already developed. Without the financial muscle to fund large-scale mapping and sequencing itself, HUGO worked to establish an international framework for these projects. An agreement to divide the mapping of the 24 human chromosomes among some dozens of laboratories around the world avoided wasting resources through duplication, and a tradition of sharing information at frequent meetings and workshops quickly developed.

Following favourable reports from the National Academy of Sciences and other bodies in the USA, both the DOE and NIH were preparing to commit serious money to mapping and sequencing the human genome. James Watson accepted the post of Head of the NIH’s Office of Genome Research (later the National Human Genome Research Institute) in 1988, and in 1990 the NIH and DOE presented a five-year plan to the US Congress - thus formally inaugurating the first phase of what was planned as a 15-year Human Genome Project.

Image credit: Peter Artymiuk