Scientists unveiled the first working draft of the human genome
On this day · 26 June 2000
In the White House East Room, two rival teams set aside a bitter race to announce they had read most of human DNA's three billion letters.
On June 26, 2000, President Bill Clinton stood in the East Room of the White House and declared that scientists had produced a working draft of the human genome — the roughly three billion chemical letters of A, C, G and T that spell out a human being. British Prime Minister Tony Blair joined by satellite.
The announcement was a carefully staged truce. The publicly funded Human Genome Project, led by Francis Collins, had been racing a private company, Celera Genomics, headed by J. Craig Venter. Rather than let one side claim victory, the two camps shared the stage and agreed to publish together.
“Today, we are learning the language in which God created life,” Clinton said.
The draft was rough and full of gaps, and a truly finished sequence would not arrive until 2003. Still, it handed researchers a near-complete instruction book for human biology, reshaping how scientists hunt for disease genes and design medicines.
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