"It's the triangle formula", wrote the Washington Post on 16 February 1988: "a mega-project plus the scientific establishment plus Congress equals the politics of American research".

Astronomers and physicists had proposed building a space station and a giant atom smasher, and the worth of 'big science' was already being hotly debated in the US press when political lobbying began for the human genome project — the "holy grail of biology" as the Post described it, or "a splendid piece of symbolism and a scientific disaster" as the Guardian suggested it might be (16 February 1988). "Suddenly, science is competing for scarce funding not only against other national needs, but against itself," wrote Newsweek (18 April 1988): "in the era of federal deficits, a dollar for 'big science' is probably a dollar withheld from small science."

Despite these concerns, and arguments over whether it was actually worth sequencing all the human genome, the project got the go-ahead. "Of all the truly great projects of science, it is HUGO that offers the most,' wrote The Times (1 October 1989). 'At HUGO's £2 billion-budget heart is a painfully slow description of the entire DNA code of Homo sapiens. It may sound dull compared with the space race, but it will be as important to the people of the 21st century as the petrol engine has been to us."

The Guardian looked at "the sinister shadow of gene bending and social control" in its article 'Future shock: The Frankenstein factor' (16 March 1991). Suggesting that the Human Genome Project, "based as it is on defective science and logic", had been sold to the US Congress by "promising those ageing members of Congress that they'll be able to live for ever", the Guardian described genetics as the 'new eugenics' which was driven by 'a voracious commercial sector exciting the public's insecurities and then meeting the needs they will have themselves created."

"In the next 15 years, detailed analysis of the structure of this chemical [DNA] is going to change the face of medicine fundamentally", wrote Dr John Collee in the Observer (15 March 1992). "The human genome sounds like a mad scientist's fantasy. So does the Channel Tunnel, but I can assure you that work is in progress on both projects."

Meanwhile, another project was quietly gathering momentum. In December 1993, the Telegraph noted that a French genetic map of the genome was being made public "through Internet, a computer network that connects scientists around the globe".