The 2000 human genome draft was only 85% sequenced

The first working draft of the human genome was announced at the White House on June 26, 2000, but it was far from finished: the public project had sequenced about 85% of it, and the last gaps in every chromosome but Y were not closed until 2022. President Bill Clinton made the announcement in the East Room, with British Prime Minister Tony Blair joining by satellite.

The event was a staged truce. The publicly funded Human Genome Project, led by Francis Collins, had been racing Celera Genomics, headed by J. Craig Venter, which used a faster “whole genome shotgun” method on the DNA of five people. Rather than let either side claim victory, both shared the stage and pledged to publish their data at the same time.

“Today, we are learning the language in which God created life,” Clinton said.

Collins told the room the consortium could now read 1,000 DNA letters a second, around the clock, and had mapped overlapping fragments covering 97% of the genome, 85% of it sequenced. The road from race to finished text:

• September 8, 1999: Celera starts sequencing, late into the race.
• June 26, 2000: the joint White House announcement of the working draft.
• April 2003: the Human Genome Project ends with its first sequence of the human genome, still with gaps.
• 2013: the standard reference, GRCh38, is released; it still holds 151 million bases of unknown sequence.
• 2022: the Telomere-to-Telomere consortium publishes a gapless 3.055-billion-letter sequence of every chromosome except Y, adding nearly 200 million letters and exposing the last hidden 8%.

Clinton also used the moment to declare that, genetically, all humans “regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same.” The National Human Genome Research Institute now calls that figure an over-simplification: counting larger insertions and deletions, two people are about 99.6% identical.

The draft was rough, but it gave researchers a near-complete instruction book two decades before the full text arrived.