Menlo Park, Calif. The biological code of mankind—three billion pairs of chemical “bases,” twisted clockwise into DNA’s iconic double-helix—was declared fully transcribed, at long last, 15 years ago. On April 14, 2003, the leaders of the Human Genome Project, an effort backed by the U.S. government, proclaimed their sequence “essentially complete.” Including the preliminary work, the task had taken 13 years and cost American taxpayers $2.7 billion.

Source: Wall Street Journal April 27, 2018 21:56 UTC