In October 1990, biologists officially embarked on one of the century’s most ambitious scientific efforts: reading the 3 billion pairs of genetic subunits — the A’s, T’s, C’s and G’s — that make up the human instruction book.
The project promised to blow open our understanding of basic biology, reveal relationships between the myriad forms of life on the planet and transform medicine through insights into genetic diseases and potential cures.
But when the draft instruction book was first published, independently by an international collective of academic and government labs called the Human Genome Project and the private company Celera Genomics, led by J. Craig Venter, the text was “as striking for what we don’t see as for what we do,” Science News reported. There were many fewer genes than expected, leaving a puzzle about what all the remaining DNA was for.
In the decades since, scientists have filled in some of that puzzle — identifying a host of genes, for example, that don’t make proteins but are still essential in the body. Other researchers have searched the instruction book to find new treatments for diseases and to figure out how we’re all related — not just people, but all life on planet Earth, past and present.
