Human Genome Project

The Human Genome Project (HGP) was an international research effort, carried out from 1990 to 2003, to read the complete DNA sequence of a human being. It cost about 2.7 billion US dollars, and its open release of data set the standard for sharing in biology.

A public consortium of laboratories in the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Germany and China cut the DNA of volunteers into fragments, mapped and sequenced them, and assembled the pieces. A private company, Celera Genomics, pursued a faster whole-genome shotgun approach from 1998. A joint announcement of a working draft came in June 2000 and the project declared completion in April 2003, fifty years after Watson and Crick described the structure of DNA.

The human genome has about 3.1 billion base pairs, but only around 20,000 protein-coding genes, far fewer than expected, and these make up under 2 percent of the sequence. Much of the rest includes repeats and transposable elements. The 2003 sequence left gaps, and a gap-free sequence was finally published in 2022 by the Telomere-to-Telomere consortium.

Sequencing costs fell from billions of dollars to a few hundred dollars per genome, as described in DNA sequencing. The project helped found genomics, personalized medicine and bioinformatics. It also devoted a share of its budget to the study of ethical, legal and social issues, such as genetic privacy.

• Genomics — the field it launched
• DNA Sequencing — the technology it advanced
• Genome — what it mapped