The Human Genome Project - Brutes or Angels: Human Possibility in the Age of Biotechnology - page 110

forts resulted in the establishment and cooperation of twenty genome-
sequencing centers in Britain, Germany, france, Japan, China, and the
United states. These collaborating centers comprised the ihGsC and be-
came known as the Public Consortium. in addition to assembling an inter-
national team of researchers, the ihGsC committed to making its genomic
sequence data available to the entire world as soon as it was obtained. At
the end of each day's work, the sequences deciphered that day were posted
on the consortium's public website. The ihGsC succeeded brilliantly in
modeling international scientific cooperation.
francis Collins replaced James Watson as director of the Public Con-
sortium in 1993. While director, Collins and his colleagues at the nih and
Department of energy (Doe) prepared two detailed ive-year plans for the
project, one in 1993 and the other in 1998. Both plans were published in
Science magazine (Collins and Galas, 1993; Collins et al. 1998) and are on
the hGP information website. 3 That site lists six project goals:
1. identify all of the approximately 20,000-25,000 genes in human DnA.
2. Determine the sequences of the 3 billion chemical base pairs that make
up human DnA.
3. store this information in databases.
4. improve tools for data analysis.
5. Transfer related technologies to the private sector.
6. Address the ethical, legal, and social issues (elsi) that may arise from
the project.
Two other high-priority objectives for the project were having accuracy
in sequencing and providing technology to identify spots in the genome
that differ between individuals. for accuracy, the project set a standard of
less than one error in every ten thousand bases sequenced. remarkably,
when the final draft of the genome was completed, the error rate was only
about one in every one hundred thousand bases (ihGsC 2004). 4 As for
differences between the genomes of individuals, the project was especially
interested in spots where the base sequence varies by only a single base.