Origins

The HGP is frequently compared to the Manhattan Project as an epoch-marking grand scientific endeavor.  Certainly both involved some of the best scientific minds of their time applied to a single task with broad technical, social, political and economic consequences.  But most commentators making this analogy don’t realize just how apt it is.  The two projects aren’t just similar, they’re directly linked.  The detonation of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 created scientific waves that 40 years later ignited the Human Genome Project.

The wartime Manhattan Project that successfully developed the first atomic bombs grew into the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and finally the DOE.  The AEC Act of 1947 required that, along with its primary focus on understanding nuclear physics, the agency explore the biological effects, both beneficial and harmful, of ionizing radiation.  This responsibility eventually led to the creation of DOE’s Office of Health and Environmental Research (OHER, changed to the Office of Biological and Environmental Research in 1998).  As part of this biological research the “mouse house” was created at ORNL, where DOE scientists pioneered research into the biological effects of radiation on mammals.

However, by the late 1970s many researchers felt that a whole organism approach to studying the effects of radiation couldn’t answer one of the most vexing and insidious problems — heritable genetic mutations caused by exposure to low-dose radiation.  This in turn led several DOE national labs to increase research into genome structure, damage and repair in microbes and mammals.

It was a biological research mission clearly spelled out in law, but one that in the early 1980s left lawmakers befuddled and looking to cut DOE’s life sciences bottom line.  Fresh on the job as director of DOE research, Trivelpiece recalls being grilled at Congressional hearings about why DOE was in the biology business at all.

“For the same reason it does geology,” says Trivelpiece, who took himself on a self-educating grand tour of DOE’s biology projects early in his stint as director of research.  “Everything that involves energy comes out of the ground or goes into it and you ought to know how, when and where.  It’s the same with biology and the impact of energy on people.  With ionizing radiation it’s obligatory for DOE to be doing this research.” Of course, life sciences research is the smallest of DOE’s four research areas, along with fusion, general physics and high energy and nuclear physics.  Ironically, for the success of the HGP, the key wasn’t that DOE was primarily a biology research agency, but rather that it wasn’t.

Biology by the Numbers

In August 1985, Dr. Charles DeLisi made a career move that was both a major change and a homecoming.  The ten-year veteran National Institutes of Health (NIH) bench scientist packed up his personal belongings from his Bethesda, Maryland lab and moved 15 miles north to Germantown, Maryland to begin his new desk job as director of DOE’s Office of Health and Environmental Research.  For DeLisi, the switch from the lab to the office was matched by an equal culture shift from an organization dominated by life scientists to one led by physical scientists.  It was a critical switch for the HGP.

DeLisi wasn’t your typical NIH scientist.  Even at the world’s leading biomedical research facility he was one of only a handful of scientists deeply interested in mathematical biology.  Trained as an experimental physicist, DeLisi had done a post-doc in chemistry at Yale University during which he created the first numerical calculations of RNA structure.  In 1972, this numerical modeling led to his joining the T-10 group at DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, one of the only teams in the world applying mathematical and computational techniques to biological questions.  Here he began research in immunology which led, in 1975, to his being hired as a senior scientist at NIH’s National Cancer Institute, where he founded NIH’s section in theoretical immunology.

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