Who’d want to read that? (Image: Mario Tama / Getty)
BACK in 1984, Robert Sinsheimer had a problem. As chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz, he had raised $36 million towards the $70 million needed for a new telescope, but a new donor had suddenly stepped in and provided the whole $70 million. An enviable problem, perhaps, but if Sinsheimer couldn’t persuade the existing donors to support another big science project, the university would have to return the $36 million.
While physicists and astronomers rarely hesitated to ask for huge sums, biologists had always thought small. But Sinsheimer, a molecular biologist, decided that it was time for that to change. He proposed creating an institute to sequence the human genome.
That plan never got off the ground, but it led to the first workshop to discuss sequencing the human genome, held in Santa Cruz in 1985. Most biologists did not embrace the idea, though. In fact, many ridiculed it. “I’m surprised consenting adults have been caught in public talking about it… It makes no sense,” one told New Scientist in 1987 (5 March, p 35).
The reason was that biologists thought that most of our DNA is useless. Given that DNA sequencing was extremely slow and expensive at the time, many argued that sequencing the entire genome was a waste of money. They feared the project would take funding away from their existing studies.
Despite the objections, the idea gained momentum. First the US Department of Energy and then the National Institutes of Health began considering the idea. The project officially got under …
