At first glance, the human genome is deceptively simple, comprised of 3 billion base pairs of only four repeating chemical bases: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine(C), and thymidine (T). Each somatic cell has two copies of the genome, for a total of 6 billion base pairs. However, on deeper consideration, it is mind-numbingly difficult to grasp the amount of data this code encompasses, and the challenges extracting it posed only two decades ago. The Human Genome Project (HGP) developed methods for rapidly, inexpensively, and accurately determining the entire linear sequence of the genome to replace the slow, expensive, and labor-intensive approaches available at its launch in October 1990.6 This led to the completion of the draft sequence of the human genome, as announced at the White House in June 2000 to much fanfare in the scientific and lay press.7 The HGP ended in April 2003, with a more finished sequence, fifty years to the month after Watson and Crick’s seminal description of the DNA double helix.8
