Talk

Can you think of any better coda to making the Nobel-prize winning discovery of DNA than to be handed the sequence of your own, personal genome? Better yet, to be the first to ever receive your fully sequenced genome?

Rarely is life that poetic, but yesterday Dr. James Watson was presented with two DVDs (two DVDs?! anyone else think that’s funny?) containing the sequence of his genome by Richard Gibbs, director of the Human Genome Sequencing Center at the Baylor College of Medicine, and Jonathan Rothberg, founder of 454 Life Sciences, which did the sequencing. Upon presentation Gibbs said,

“When we began the Human Genome Project, we anticipated it would take 15 years to sequence the 3 billion base pairs and identify all the genes. We completed it in 13 years in 2003 – coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the publication of the work of Watson and Dr. Francis Crick that described the double helix. Today, we give James Watson a DVD containing his personal genome – a project completed in only two months. It demonstrates how far the sequencing technology has come in a short time.”

So here’s to the father of the human genome, which I think he will inevitably called. (Not only did he and his colleagues discover the structure of DNA, but he became the architect and first director of the NHGRI’s Human Genome Project, which completed the first human genome in 2003.) May he find his genes are healthy and long-lived. May his unknown ApoE genes be low risk.

With genome in hand, Dr. Watson now plans to write about what having this information will mean to him, his family and the future of genetic medicine. And I’m looking forward to it. The man tells a good story. His passion for the science and care for what is made from it, along with a healthy dose of humor, make for good reading. Let’s see what advice the father of the human genome has to say for the next generations.

• Press Release from Baylor University, where the ceremony took place (Thanks, Blaine)
• The Double Helix, Watson’s account of the discovery of DNA (if you haven’t read it, you really should!)

Technorati Tags: james watson, dna, human genome, discovery, sequencing, human genome project

This entry was posted on Friday, June 1st, 2007 at 10:21 am and is filed under Human Genome. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.