For the 20-year anniversary of this historic event, we took a look back at the Human Genome Project and its impact. How did it shape science moving forward?
“I think the very most important accomplishment in the past 20 years has been the advent of next-generation sequencing. The ability to perform sequencing in a massively parallel way, so that you could do it far more quickly and cheaply,” said Stacey Gabriel, director of the Genomics Platform at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, another major research site involved in the Human Genome Project. “And that has come with all of the associated advancement in our computational abilities, too, to really be able to take that data and analyze it at a massive scale as well.”
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Perhaps equally important was the project’s impact on scientific collaboration. The effort directly led to an international agreement meant to ensure open access to DNA sequences. It also made clear that great things could be possible when large groups of scientists worked together, according to Gibbs.
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“It simply changed the way that people thought that biology could be done,” he said. “It built a model for team science that was not there before.”
