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Human Genome Project: How it came to rely on one donor's DNA | STAT

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T hey numbered 20 in all — 10 men and 10 women who came to a sprawling medical campus in downtown Buffalo, N.Y., to volunteer for what a news report had billed as “the world’s biggest science project.” advertisement It was the spring of 1997, and the Human Genome Project, an ambitious attempt to read and map a human genetic code in its entirety, was building momentum. The project’s scientists had refined techniques to read out the chemical sequences — the series of As, Cs, Ts, and Gs — that encode the building blocks of life. Now, the researchers just needed suitable human DNA to work with. More exactly, they needed DNA from ordinary people willing to have their genetic information published for the world to see. The volunteers who showed up at Buffalo’s Roswell Park Cancer Institute had come to answer the call. To take part in the study was to assume risks that were hard to calculate or predict. If the volunteers were publicly outed, project scientists told them, they might be contact

STAT is co-publishing this investigation by Undark . T hey numbered 20 in all — 10 men and 10 women who came to a sprawling medical campus in downtown Buffalo, N.Y., to volunteer for what a news report had billed as “the world’s biggest science project.” Advertisement It was the spring of 1997, and the Human Genome Project, an ambitious attempt to read and map a human genetic code in its entirety, was building momentum. The project’s scientists had refined techniques to read out the chemical sequences — the series of As, Cs, Ts, and Gs — that encode the building blocks of life . Now, the resea

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