According to Trivelpiece, the inter-agency competition that overtook the DOE’s initial lead in the project represented the American science establishment at its best: not always pretty or the most efficient, but highly competitive and productive.

“The right thing, from my point of view, happened for the United States as a result of the tiff between NIH and DOE,” says Trivelpiece.  “If what we did at DOE caused NIH to wake up and do what it should have done to begin with, I’m very pleased with the outcome of that.  They just didn’t have the same ensemble of resources that the DOE labs did.”

In fact, an edge in high-performance computing would continue to create controversy for the HGP, this time between the public and private human genome sequencing efforts.

Just as DOE scientists had recognized the power of supercomputing to decipher the human genome, Craig Venter and eventually Celera, the company he founded, upped the ante by using a computationally intensive “shotgun” approach to sequencing the human genome.  The technique involved the previously unthinkable notion of shredding the entire human genome, sequencing the pieces using 300 state-of-the-art automated sequencing machines, and then reassembling this DNA jigsaw puzzle using the world’s fastest supercomputers.

“If Craig Venter hadn’t come on the scene, if there hadn’t been that public-private competition, there’s no way that the project would be finished today,” says DeLisi.  “It would have taken at least another decade, because the economy had turned uncertain.”

On January 8th, 2001, Charles DeLisi received the Presidential Citizens Medal from President Bill Clinton recognizing his role as the first government scientist to conceive and outline the feasibility, goals, and parameters of the Human Genome Project.

In presenting the honor, President Clinton noted that “Charles DeLisi’s imagination and determination helped to ignite the revolution in sequencing that would ultimately unravel the code of human life itself.  Thanks to his vision and leadership, in the year 2000 we announced the complete sequencing of the human genome.  Researchers are now closer than ever to finding therapies and cures for ailments once thought untreatable.”

Al Trivelpiece, who left his role as Director of the DOE’s Office of Energy Research in 1987, had attended the formal announcement in 2000 of the completion of the first stage of the HGP.

In both cases, the public recognition was welcome, but beyond this was the lasting experience — as exemplified by Trivelpiece’s treasured 92-word memo — of having been involved in launching a project that didn’t just achieve the seemingly impossible, but more.  It changed the nature of biology.

“Seeing this cultural shift makes me personally feel good. I spent a good part of my career basically fighting to have mathematics and computational methods accepted in the biological sciences,” says DeLisi.

Computational biology is now a core part of both the best computer science and biology programs, with joint graduate degrees now being offered at many universities.  Ironically, concern over the reductionist role of a mathematical and computational approach to biology has led, in part, to the opposite — an explosion in biomolecular systems and complexity studies thanks to the information and technology evolving from the HGP.  And the HGP has also been the engine for U.S.  leadership in the biotech industry, one seamlessly combining biology and high-performance computers.

And perhaps there’s nothing more telling of the scientific and technological revolution unleashed by the HGP than the fact that in October 2003, less than 20 years after the start of the HGP, Santa Clara, California-based Affymetrix, Inc.  introduced a new biological probe technology with the entire protein coding content of the human genome — on a chip the size of a thumbnail.

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