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A wealth of discovery built on the Human Genome Project — by the numbers

A new analysis traces the story of the draft genome’s impact on genomics since 2001, linking its effects on publications, drug approvals and understanding of disease.
  1. Alexander J. Gates

    1. Alexander J. Gates is an associate research scientist at the Network Science Institute, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

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  2. Deisy Morselli Gysi

    1. Deisy Morselli Gysi is a postdoctoral research associate at the Network Science Institute, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, and research trainee at the Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston.

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  3. Manolis Kellis

    1. Manolis Kellis is professor of computer science and principal investigator of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, and member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge.

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  4. Albert-László Barabási

    1. Albert-László Barabási is professor of network science and a distinguished university professor at the Network Science Institute, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA; lecturer at the Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, and visiting professor at the Department of Network and Data Science, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary.

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The 20th anniversary of the publication of the first draft of the human genome1,2 offers an opportunity to track how the project has empowered research into the genetic roots of human disease, changed drug discovery and helped to revise the idea of the gene itself.

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Nature 590, 212-215 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-00314-6

A.J.G. and D.M.G. contributed equally to this article.

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