GENETICS × TECHNOLOGY

The Human Genome

2001 to 2022 CE

Phanerozoic · Cenozoic · Quaternary · Holocene · Meghalayan

Three billion letters, read first in draft by a public consortium and a private company racing each other, and declared finished in 2003. Eight per cent was in fact still missing: long stretches of repeated sequence that short reads could not cross, because a repeat looks the same wherever you land in it. Crossing them took a technology that reads long pieces whole, and the last gaps closed in 2022, on every chromosome but Y.

Why it matters

It made our own species readable, and turned the distance between us and any other genome into a measurable quantity. The nineteen-year tail is the part usually left out, and it is the interesting one: the easy ninety-two per cent took a decade, the awkward eight took two more.

Dating & uncertainty

The genome was finished twice, which is why this entry carries two dates. Two drafts appeared in 2001, one public and one private, and the project was declared complete in 2003; the missing eight per cent was filled in 2022, for every chromosome but Y.

Sources

1. International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium (2001), Nature · Initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome
2. Venter et al. (2001), Science · The sequence of the human genome
3. Nurk et al. (2022), Science · The complete sequence of a human genome

Earth history as one day

23:59:59.9995476 µs before midnight

if Earth’s 4.54 billion years were compressed into a single day