By 1998 Venter had established Celera Genomics with sequencing capacity fifty times greater than TIGR, and by June 17, 2000, he concluded a ninety percent complete account of the human genome. Venter then established The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) and began using Applied Biosystems automatic sequencers twenty-four hours per day to speed up nucleotide sequencing and the locating of ESTs. 1916) is famed for his discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, was the first to head the NCHGR 1928) from the directorship of NIH's National Center for Human Genome Research (NCHGR). A furor developed when researchers working with government money applied for patents on data that merely reports knowledge of what already exists in nature -knowledge of existing DNA sequences -and this led to the 1992 resignation of James Watson (b. The ESTs located genes but stopped short of identifying gene function. While on a grant from NIH, Venter applied for nearly three thousand patents on Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs). What was not anticipated was the competition between the private sector and the public sector. Many early prophecies found their fulfillment. This would benefit society, HGP architects thought, because a library of DNA knowledge would jump start medical research on many fronts. The secondary motive was perhaps even more important, namely, to identify the four thousand or so genes that were suspected to be responsible for inherited diseases and prepare the way for treatment through genetic therapy. The primary motive was that which drives all basic science, namely, the need to know. Mapping would eventually reveal the position and spacing of the then predicted one hundred thousand genes in each of the human body's cells sequencing would determine the order of the four base pairs -the A (adenine), T (thymine), G (guanine), and C (cytosine) nucleotides -that compose the DNA molecule. The scientific goal was to map the genes and sequence human DNA.
Department of Energy (DOE) began funding the project in 1987, followed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1990. It was international in scope, involving numerous laboratories and associations of scientists around the world and receiving public funding in the United States of $200 million per year with a scheduled fifteen year timeline. When begun, HGP was dubbed "big science" comparable to placing human beings on the moon. The worldwide effort, originally named the Human Genome Initiative but later known as the Human Genome Project or HGP, began in 1987 and was celebrated as complete in 2001.
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