“In a lot of the news stories you read, it just sounds like the HGP sort of happened automatically, that it’s just part of the whole biological enterprise and follows continuously from everything that happened in the past,” says DeLisi.  “Of course, it doesn’t.  It was going nowhere and it was very hard work and very complicated to get it off the ground.”

Following the Santa Fe conference, DeLisi drafted a formal proposal for a Human Genome Project — prophetically targeting 2000-2001 as the completion date.  It was this proposal that formed the basis for Trivelpiece’s presentation — which included the famous 11-by-17 inch display panel — to DOE Under Secretary Joe Salgado and Deputy Secretary Bill Martin, succinctly outlining the rationale for the project.  Based on this presentation, Salgado agreed to Trivelpiece’s reprogramming of $4 million to kick-start the DOE HGP initiative.

With DOE backing, DeLisi — barely a year out of his life as a lab scientist — quickly set to work learning the feisty ecology of Beltway politics and budgetary maneuvering.  Ironically, he says, it was the project’s clear and finite objective — to catalogue the 3 billion base pairs in the human genome and identify the genes — that made it saleable to key bureaucratic and political decision makers.

“Office of Management and Budget members were very supportive because they understood it as an engineering project.  It was finite,” says DeLisi, who left DOE in 1987, shortly after launching the HGP.

DeLisi proved a persuasive pitchman.  The first mention of government support for the HGP came in President Ronald Reagan’s Budget Message in January 1987, followed by a line item for about $16 million for DOE’s human genome initiative in the 1987 budget.

With the emerging political and financial support for the nascent HGP, top NIH officials quickly began to change their attitude to the project and jockey for a role — the lead role. Trivelpiece recalls being publicly chastised by then-NIH Director James Wyngaarten for mentioning the DOE’s HGP to a group of students.  Human biology, as far as the NIH was concerned, was its turf.  In early 1988, a National Research Council report entitled “Mapping and Sequencing the Human Genome” gave the HGP the government’s official seal of approval.  It recommended that there should be a major fiscal outlay for a phased project and that there should be a lead agency: either DOE, NIH, or perhaps the National Science Foundation (NSF).

“As the genome project gained professional funding and scientific respectability, NIH wrested control from DOE. Urged by a group of advisers who met outside Washington, D.C., in Reston, Virginia in March 1988, then-NIH director James Wyngaarten announced that NIH would create a special office for genome research.  In short order, he nabbed (James) Watson to head it, and with that coup, NIH was firmly ensconced as the lead agency,” states a history of the HGP published in Science.

The Genomics Revolution

What DeLisi and Trivelpiece had been instrumental in helping launch quickly took on a massive life of its own as part of the genomics and bioinformatics revolution.

Though DOE gradually fell out of the public spotlight on the HGP, DOE labs continued to play a critical role in sequencing the human genome, collectively contributing over 10% of the total sequencing.

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