Franklin Foer

It was pretty incredible.

I am a physician scientist who worked at the National Human Genome Research Institute at the U.S.

National Institutes of Health for 31 years and even served as the director of the institute for the last 15 years I was there.

It's sort of biology's equivalent of the moonshot.

Instead of putting a person on a moon, what the Human Genome Project did was to read out for the very first time the exact order of the building blocks, and there's three billion such building blocks in all human DNA.

When I get competitive with the moonshot, I sometimes point out that the goal of the Apollo mission and the moonshot was to put a person on the moon.

And that's now been repeated a handful of times, you know, not in the dozens, but a handful of times we've put a person back on the moon.

The goal, the signature goal of the Human Genome Project was to read out all the letters in the human genome.

That has now been repeated millions and millions of times.

When the Genome Project ended, our institute pivoted to begin to use genomics as part of medicine, basically using genomic information about individual patients to improve their medical management.

Genomics has just infused its way into all areas of life sciences.

I mean, everything from agriculture to ecology to evolutionary studies.

And, you know, 22 years ago, there was minimal that we could do in terms of getting insights about a patient's DNA.

And now it's routine, whether it's prenatal screening to look for chromosomal and DNA abnormalities in unborn children or in cancer, which is a disease of the genome.

The way we deal with cancer now is completely different.

because of genomics or with rare genetic diseases.

And I just want to stress that it's just the earliest days.

The return on investment for the Genome Project was phenomenal.

And I think it continues to be leveraged even up to the present time.

There was no private equity venture capital firm in the world that was ever going to put up the $3 billion that was required to do this project that involved cooperation around the world that was coordinated by the United States, but that involved scientists everywhere in this project that was done for all mankind, to use the NASA phrase.