It was half a year into the new millennium when Human Genome Project leader Francis Collins announced internally that the consortium would be presenting a first draft of a fully sequenced human genome at the White House in around a month's time. The only problem? The teams didn't yet have a sequenced genome—it was more like a "pile of DNA" fragments, according to David Haussler, scientific director at the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute. And the deadline was part of a negotiated tie in the heated race with biotech company Celera. "That was like a thunderbolt," Haussler told Tech Brew. "There was no way we were ready to do any kind of presentation." A UC Santa Cruz grad student named Jim Kent "worked night and day for four weeks, writing 20,000 lines of C code and icing his wrists periodically," in order to make the historic milestone possible. On June 26, 2000, President Bill Clinton and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair stood, via telelink, by the two teams of rival scientists—Celera's and the Human Genome Project's—as they announced the "rough draft" of a full human genome. It was the culmination of decades of work by thousands of researchers all over the world, and Clinton declared that "humankind is on the verge of gaining immense new power to heal." In conversations with scientists nearly 25 years later, it's hard to pin down just one legacy of the human genome sequencing, which supercharged whole fields of biotechnology, laid the groundwork for a genetics revolution, and led to many large-scale follow-up scientific undertakings. But in some other ways, the field is only beginning to live up to some outsized expectations now. Keep reading here.—PK | 
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