GENETICS

Reading Our Own Recipe

2003 CE

History · Contemporary · Holocene · Meghalayan

An international consortium published the draft human genome in 2001 and the finished sequence in 2004: three billion letters, read to an accuracy of one error per hundred thousand bases, revealing to general surprise only some 20,000 to 25,000 protein-coding genes. The reference sequence became the backdrop against which every human genome since, ancient or living, is read.

Why it matters

Our species acquired its own instruction book, and with it a mirror: fewer genes than a rice plant, vast tracts of shared inheritance, individual differences measured in fractions of a percent. Medicine, ancestry, forensics and the entire ancient-DNA revolution in this timeline run on this reference. The sequencing price collapse that followed turned a three-billion-dollar feat into a routine test.

Dating & uncertainty

The draft sequence was published in 2001 and the finished euchromatic sequence in 2004; the project's completion was declared in April 2003, fifty years after the double helix. 'Finished' meant 99 percent of the gene-rich genome; the last stubborn stretches took another two decades.

Sources

1. International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium (2001), Nature · Initial sequencing and analysis of the human genomedoi:10.1038/35057062
2. International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium (2004), Nature · Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genomedoi:10.1038/nature03001
3. Green et al. (2010), Science · A draft sequence of the Neandertal genomedoi:10.1126/science.1188021

Our species’ history as one day

23:59:536.3 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day