The Book of Us: The Human Genome Sequenced
2003 · event
In April 2003, fifty years, almost to the day, after Watson, Crick and Franklin revealed the double helix, an international consortium of thousands of scientists announced they had read the entire human genome: three billion letters, the complete recipe for a human being.
The project took thirteen years and cost about a billion dollars; today the same sequencing costs a few hundred and takes a day. It launched personalised medicine, cancer genomics, and the ancestry science that reunites long-lost relatives across continents.
Perhaps its deepest finding was the simplest: every two humans on Earth are 99.9 % identical. The Book of Us has seven billion copies in print, and they are all, essentially, the same story with different margins.