Human genome

The Human Genome Project starts in 1990 as a public effort, mainly in the United States and Britain, to read the full sequence of human DNA. A draft is announced in 2000. A more finished sequence is published in 2003. Celera, a private project, races the public one in the later years.

The contribution is DNA as a file. Once the sequence is letters in a database, biology can be searched, compared, and edited with software. Later reading machines drop the cost from billions of dollars to hundreds. mRNA vaccines in 2020 are possible because a virus's gene can be read and then written into a recipe in days.

The genome is not a blueprint that explains a person. Most DNA is not a simple gene-to-trait line. The contribution is the data, not a complete understanding.

The card spans the project because there is no single day the genome was 'done.' 2003 is the usual end of the first project.