The Human Genome Project
Three billion base pairs are sequenced, and the gene count comes in far lower than expected.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 13 years
- Era
- Contemporary, Holocene
A public consortium and Celera's rival private effort produce a draft in 2001 and a complete sequence in 2003, ahead of schedule and under budget, with the public data released freely under the Bermuda principles. Humans turned out to have around 20,000 protein-coding genes, comparable to a nematode, which forced a rethink of how complexity arises. Sequencing costs have since fallen from billions to hundreds of dollars.