Twenty-five years ago, the world heard the words: “We’ve got it!”. The first map of human DNA ceased to be a science-fiction dream and became a reality. This was not merely a scientific success and a milestone in the history of biology – it was a momentous event in the history of all humankind. For the first time, we were able to read our own “instruction manual”. An instruction manual that, as it turned out, is neither easy to understand nor even to read. When printed on paper, the complete sequence of the human genome fills 109 volumes – books of roughly 1,000 pages each, densely packed with an uninterrupted string of repeating characters (a, c, t, g), set in a tiny, barely legible font. Until 2023, these volumes could be viewed at the “Medicine Now” exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London (https://wellcomecollection.org/stories/the-key-to-memory–write-it-down). 

In February 2001, just 24 hours apart, two of the world’s leading scientific journals – Nature and Science – published the first results of sequencing the complete human genome. On 15 February, Nature published the findings of the publicly funded Human Genome Project, (https://www.genome.gov/human-genome-project), and just a day later, on 16 February, Science presented the version produced by the private company Celera Genomics. Although the two teams competed fiercely in a dramatic race to the finish, the outcome was the same: the world saw the first nearly complete sequence of the human genome. It became the source of countless discoveries and the foundation for innumerable studies that continue to this day. It also spurred the development of DNA sequencing technologies, the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries, and personalized medicine.

Source:
Cover of Nature magazine, Volume 409, ISSUE 6822, 15 February 2001,© Springer Nature (https://www.nature.com/nature/volumes/409/issues/6822)
Cover of Science magazine, Volume 291, Issue 5507, 16 February 2001, © American Association for the Advancement of Science (https://www.science.org/toc/science/291/5507)