Mapping the Human Genetic Blueprint.

Humans are made up of billions of cells, each of which performs a specific function. The coding for these functions is located in the "blueprint" held in each cell's chromosomes, and the collection of genes on the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes constitutes the human genome. Mapping the precise sequence of the 3 billion nucleotides that make up the genetic sequence in the human genome became the focus of many geneticists' work during the 1980s. "The total human sequence," as Walter Gilbert noted, "is the grail of human genetics."

Big Science.

Judged technically feasible at conferences of biologists in 1985 and 1986, the U.S. government committed itself to funding the effort to map the blueprint of human life in 1989. In January 1989, partly spurred on by an awareness that scientists in Japan and the European nations were beginning to catch up with...