Elbert Branscomb

...the task that we are up to here is figuring out how life works...

Richard Gibbs

...at a very, very fundamental level, it is a key to understanding our species...

Jane Rogers

Everyone has a genome; we are all human and it is the basis...

Francis Collins

It's a word that means all of the DNA, all of the hereditary material of an organism...

James Watson

...DNA is the script for life.

Robert Waterston

...it's the stuff that tells one gene to make its machine in muscle cells and another gene to make its machine in brain cells...

Eric Lander

...in fact, that DNA code represents solutions, evolved by life three billion years ago in some cases...

Our Shared Inheritance

Francis Collins

...the human genome is essentially our shared inheritance...

...bacteria have their genomes and dogs have their genomes and plants have their genomes and we have our genomes.

Robert Waterston

Our DNA is almost identical with chimpanzee DNA. It is only about 2 percent different. Now people probably aren't surprised that we share our genes with monkeys. But it turns out that we share about 50 percent of our genes with a tiny little round worm...

...presumably a billion years ago or 500 million years ago we had a common ancestor with the worms.

...what we learn about those genes in worms and flies and yeast, now we can translate back to humans.

Richard Gibbs

So...we are just another species on this planet.

Eric Lander

We are a very small species. The entire human race traces to a population of an effective size of only about 10,000 people in Africa, perhaps 150,000 years ago.

Francis Collins

And because we're a very new species--we ain't been around that long--we actually share most of our DNA at a remarkably identical level.

Eric Lander

We are all 99.9 percent identical...

Of course, one tenth of a percent difference out of a genome of three billion letters means any two of us also differs in three million separate places in our DNA.

...we all think of ourselves as completely unique individuals... and at some level we are...

Francis Collins

If you've seen identical twins you've noticed that they look a lot alike...well they have exactly the same DNA between them. When you get to know them, you'll also find out that they're different in pretty significant ways...

Eric Lander

But it's important for us to recognize how connected we are...how close we are with every other mammal, having the same sets of genes, the same body plan. How close we are with with trees and funguses, which run their cells pretty much the same way that we run our cells.

...the easiest way and most powerful way to see this grand unity of life is to read the DNA code. It is a three billion letter text.

Francis Collins

If we printed out DNA sequence and put it in a book, you'd turn the pages and what you would see would be a funny language where there are only four letters in the alphabet, A, C, G, and T. Which are the four bases as we call it of DNA. It would take many of these books stacked on top of each other, about the height of the Washington Monument, in fact, in order to represent all of those 3 billion letters that you have inside each cell of your body.

Elbert Branscomb

...and yet in them, those those strings, in exactly the order of the letters, lies all of the fundamental secrets, lies all the instructions that our bodies use to build themselves from a single fertilized egg, the whole thing, the whole Taj Mahal of our bodies.

Richard Gibbs

...what we have when we want to analyze a genome is a huge problem.

Francis Collins

Well, in the mid-1980s a few people began to imagine that we might mount a carefully orchestrated attempt to read the entire sequence of the human genome.

Eric Lander

The thought of sequencing the whole human genome was utterly outrageous when it was first proposed in 1985. People could barely sequence a couple hundred letters of DNA at a time. It took a tremendous change in technology to make that possible.

James Watson

...you discover, you know, that there are pessimists in this world and you spend your time with optimists...

Eric Lander

What genomics is about is taking a global picture of all of the cell, all the DNA instructions, all the RNA readouts of the genes, all the proteins at once.

Richard Gibbs

It's like, for example, mapping the continental United States. At the DNA sequence level we certainly want building by building, this whole map...we want yard by yard across the whole continent. We take the big picture, we divide it up, and we organize the smaller pictures relative to one another.

Francis Collins

The human genome project is an international, multi-component effort to read out the instruction book for human biology that is our genome, all of the DNA--and to understand what it's telling us...

Eric Lander

We had to build all sorts of automated robotic systems to process hundreds of thousands of samples a day.

Lauren Linton

We work with about a thousand plates of DNA here a day or a 100,000 DNA molecules sequenced here a day.

Kevin McKernan

DNA starts at one end of the process in the lab and works its way through all the way down these hallways behind me as a large fragment of DNA.

Jane Rogers

The process of sequencing is determining the sequence of all the individual units in the DNA.

Kevin McKernan

As it moves down the hallway, it gets chopped up into small bits turned into many smaller bits of DNA that work their way through all these robotic lines to get purified and sequenced.

Jane Rogers

It is a process that has to be repeated many, many, many times, because of the size of the human genome.

Kevin McKernan

And eventually hit a sequencer which will give you the fluorescent readout of every base pair in that fragment of DNA.

Jane Rogers

Whilst we can get a sequence of bases in the genome, we don't know everything yet about how the bases are organized.

Eric Lander

We're just beginning readers right now.

Francis Collins

We have only the faintest glimmer of what a lot of this information is really telling us.

James Watson

In a sense, we have the book of human life. We can read the letters. And now we are trying to find the words and, um, put them together into sentences.

Knowledge For All

Lauren Linton

We are making this information completely available, automatically available nightly. It's just picked up and automatically sent to public databases.

Elbert Branscomb

This means that any scientist, anywhere, who has some idea can use this information to advance the question that they're working on. And this suddenly empowers all the brains of the planet...

Robert Waterston

So by putting it out daily we are speeding discovery.

Richard Gibbs

It is something about a big project where you have a lot of people working. Real synergism, where the sum of the parts is more than the individual components.

Elbert Branscomb

It's giving biologists, a, an opportunity to truly understand what is going on inside living systems...and look at the parts that are actually moving inside and to understand how they are failing to work properly when they fail.

A Glitch In The Genes

James Watson

We wanted to have it to cure disease.

Elbert Branscomb

...we will now be in a position, fairly soon, to understand what underlies that otherwise mysterious and threatening reality that some of us are strongly defended against certain...threats and others are vulnerable.

Francis Collins

Genes in general are there for very good reasons. We'd be in bad shape without them all working together to keep us healthy. But if there's a glitch there in a particular one then it may not quite do it's job and then a disease may result.

A certain set of illnesses, things like cystic fibrosis or sickle cell anemia or Huntington's disease, a particular kind of misspelling - almost certainty you're going to develop the disease. But many diseases aren't like that. The variation, the misspelling in the gene increases your risk but it's not yes or no.

...a misspelling is simply a way of saying oh, you got a G there instead of a T or you had a G,T,C,C there and not it's just G,C,C.

Elbert Branscomb

We will be able to predict those things to a very high degree once we are able to go in, and say, and ask the question, which versions did you inherit, Elbert, as against some other person.

Francis Collins

Now we all have these. There are no perfect specimens. We're all flawed at the DNA level. We have probably thirty, forty, fifty glitches that are in places that we wished they weren't.

So a lot of the focus is gonna be on prevention. How do you keep people from getting sick in the first place?

Jane Rogers

...then in time, therapies, medicines, etc. will come along, and it will be a great, great benefit to everyone.

The Ethics

Kay Jamison

I think it's very hard for most people to really grasp how fundamental and how revolutionary knowledge that's coming from genetic research is, in terms of the decisions that they will be making in the future.

Robert Waterston

We are not talking about something that is distant from people. We are talking about things that are going to effect your reproduction, your health, your daily life.

James Watson

...you are going to get knowledge and how do you deal with it?

Robert Waterston

...when I get the chance, when I talk to people I tell them that this information is coming and people have to know about it.

Kay Jamison

I think any kind of new knowledge is frightening until we understand it more.

Robert Waterston

We know that there have been bad experiences with people misinterpreting genetic information and using it for ill purposes in the past.

Francis Collins

So we're engaged in a very interesting experiment. Is it in fact possible to study the ethical, legal and social implications of a scientific revolution at the same time the scientific revolution is happening? We haven't, as a human race, had a particularly good track record there.

Kay Jamison

I think any project that has the capacity to affect so many lives for good or for ill has a fundamental obligation to study what is good and what is potentially wrong...

Robert Waterston

...and we can't be so afraid of it that we don't allow ourselves to use it to correct things that really cause undue human suffering.

Far More Than Our Genes

Francis Collins

What does it mean to understand the sequence of the human genome? Are we in danger of beginning to think of ourselves as marionettes that are manipulated by strands of DNA and is this gonna damage our view of ourselves as creatures of free will and spirit?

Kay Jamison

I think it should be obvious and it isn't obvious that we are far more than just our genes.

Robert Waterston

We're clearly a complex mixture of what our genes are telling us and what the environment does to us.

Francis Collins

But I think as human beings there are aspects of who we are that this sort of approach, based on this chemical called DNA, is probably not going to reveal the mysteries of. We won't understand a lot about human relationships. We won't understand what love means. We won't understand the aspects of us that are more spiritual than mechanical.

Eric Lander

We have been trying to do science without even knowing the parts list...without even knowing the building blocks of a human.

Francis Collins

But this is, I think, one of the most exciting moments in all of science. This adventure that we're on.

James Watson

I am sure 100 years from now people will have better lives than they now do.

Jane Rogers

When I have an opportunity to sit back and think about the impact that this project is going to have on science in the future, I feel very excited, very proud to be part of it.

Elbert Branscomb

The rate at which we advance in trying to ameliorate human suffering will now go up extremely steeply.

Robert Waterston

And the kinds of moments that are comparable in my mind are big moments in history. When Copernicus and Galileo discovered that the earth was not the center of the universe...About 150 years ago Darwin showed us our place in the animal kingdom. I think what is happening today is that we're finding out now at an internal level much more about what we really are.

Richard Gibbs

This is humanity. This is homo sapiens. This is it. This is the secret of our lives.