Jack Siglin
On the whole, Americans love races. The risks, the thrills, the tension: They’re an irrevocable part of the American ethos. We raced the USSR to the moon. We have an entire sport predicated on driving race cars in circles. However, one of the most influential races in American history took more than 20 years to complete and resulted in a tie. Rather than culminating in confetti and champagne, it ended in scientific consensus. This is the story of Craig Venter, Francis Collins and the Human Genome Project.
DNA — a 6-foot ladder (if unraveled) that weighs less than a nanogram, individually packaged almost 40 trillion times over in the human body — has literally made you what you are today. Incredibly complex, shrouded in mystery and at the same time irritatingly simple, this form of information storage was discovered for the first time in the 1800s. I say “for the first time,” as there have been three principal “discoveries” of DNA. The first merely proved that it existed. The second — famously accomplished by James Watson and Francis Crick — showed its structure. Composed of four distinct building blocks, which pair two and two, repeated ad infinitum, DNA is a twisted double helix. For scale, if each base pair in the human genome can be thought of as one second, in total the genome is 95 years long.
The last great DNA discovery was preceded by a large stumbling block: Mostly, it was incomprehensible. Similarly to how Egyptian hieroglyphics required the Rosetta stone to “crack the code,” so too did DNA need a “key.” In the 1970s, a British biochemist named Frederick Sanger managed to devise a brute-force methodology that read one base at a time. Through a mind-bogglingly enormous amount of grunt work (by his grad students, I’m sure), Sanger managed to sequence the tiny genome of an innocuous bacterium.
As a general rule, we humans are a self-centered bunch, and of course it was only a matter of time until scientists on the cutting edge turned to the infinitely more complex human genome. Two, in fact, turned at the same time. On one side of the ring there was Francis Collins, the mild-mannered and government-funded geneticist. On the other side, the bad boy of biochemistry: maverick Craig Venter, funded by the private sector and, in the words of Faulkner, beholden to no man. In accordance with their personality differences, each employed different methods: Collins a plodding, precise approach, and Venter “shotgun sequencing,” the name of which tells all. Each quietly decrying the other’s methods, a scientific tradition as old as science itself, the two forged on through the 1990s.
In 2000, draft one was completed. In February 2001, Collins and Venter had papers published one day apart that declared essentially the same thing: the genome of anonymous male donor RP11, from Buffalo, New York, was done. Today, I can spit into a test tube, drop it in the mail, and for a little more than $200 including shipping, have my genome sequenced in several business days.
The cracking of the genome’s code has led to an almost inconceivable renovation of the way we approach biology. Just last year, a group of Chinese scientists managed to edit the genome of a human embryo. The key has been found, and the door has been thrown wide open. It’s hard to say what will come next.
The Human Genome Project revealed much about what makes us unique. More so than that, however, it has shown us an unbelievable universality: We are, by an incomprehensible order of magnitude, more the same than different. On the day Venter and Collins made their joint announcement of their discoveries, Collins was quoted as saying, “The only race we’re interested in today is the human race.” And, NASCAR aside, may it ever be so.
