In 1990, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) established a Human Genome Center at Washington University School of Medicine.

The McDonnell Genome Institute played an integral part in achieving this goal, contributing more than 20% of the draft sequence, and developing a comprehensive BAC clone map of the human genome. In addition, we have identified more than 300,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs, as a member of the SNP Consortium.

The Human Genome Project (HGP) was launched in the US in 1990 and jointly funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy. The announcement of the completion of the draft sequence of the human genome in June, 2000, and its subsequent publication in Nature in February, 2001, marked an important milestone for the HGP. For the first time, scientists were able to view the features of our own human “instruction manual.”