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When Aled Edwards launched the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) in 2003, he saw a chance to take on the biological unknown. With the Human Genome Project wrapping up, researchers had identified the ~20,000 genes that encode the proteins that make the cell tick. But the roles of most of these proteins were unknown, and the structures of even fewer of these had been solved. With the SGC — a public–private partnership backed initially by GSK, the Wellcome Trust and Canadian funders — Edwards and colleagues set out to solve the structures of more of these proteins to shed light on their functions.