Original subtitles

[dramatic music]

- [Narrator] Humanity's greatest uncracked code.

- The human genome is the instruction book

for how humans are formed.

- [Narrator] Unlocking the key to life

will not only be a race against time, but also big business.

- The human genome sequence

is the common inheritance of mankind

and nobody should own it.

- And that's not how science should work.

- [Narrator] Science will be pushed to its limits.

- The challenge involved is immense.

It's akin to putting the first person on the moon.

- Nobody knew whether the algorithms

or the computational power would be able to do it.

- [Narrator] But cracking the human code

will ultimately transform our understanding of life.

- This has been 4 billion years in the making,

and here I am the first human ever to see this bit.

[dramatic music]

- [Narrator] These are the codes that changed our world.

Bizarre markings, random letters and numbers,

words that make no sense.

But cracking them unlocks military secrets,

decodes ancient civilizations,

and reveals enemies in our midst.

[dramatic music]

Now we uncover how they were decoded,

the genius minds that broke them

and the secrets they revealed.

[dramatic music]

- Every organism has a genome.

It has its own code,

and it's that code that is the program

to let you go from a one celled egg, into a fetus,

[baby crying]

to a baby, then to develop.

It is the combination of all those genes,

doing all those things that makes us who we are.

- [Narrator] The human genome, our code of life,

defines what we look like.

- I've got white hair now because of my genes.

I used to have red hair and that was also my genes.

- [Narrator] It tells us where we've come from.

- As humans, we contain Neanderthal gene sequences.

There's a bit of Neanderthal in all of us.

- [Narrator] And shapes where we're going.

- A person can have a mutation in one gene

that gives them a higher risk of disease.

- [Narrator] And this code

can be found inside every cell in our bodies.

- The genome actually stretches out for a couple meters

and yet it's amazingly small.

It's so skinny,

it's somewhere around a hundredth of the diameter

of a human hair.

You can't even see the cells on your skin,

but each one of those has a genome all wrapped up,

packed together in the nucleus inside it.

- [Narrator] In the late 20th century,

unlocking the human code becomes the holy grail

for molecular scientists.

If they can unravel how human DNA works,

they will not only reveal what makes us who we are,

but also why things go wrong.

And even how they might be prevented in the first place.

- Cracking the code of the human genome

is probably the single most important avenue

to understanding the biological nature of humanity.

So much hinges on this;

From important archeological evidence

to helping us live longer healthier lives,

to tackling some of mankind's worst

and most persistent diseases.

[pensive music]

[birds chirping]

- [Narrator] The quest to crack

humanity's most important code

started over 150 years ago

in the vegetable garden of Czech monastery,

where Gregor Mendel,

an Austrian university dropout turned monk

developed an all consuming fascination with plants.

- He carried out,

in a way that seems to be fairly unrelated

to normal monk duties,

a huge set of experiments

working with pea plants in the gardens.

Mendel demonstrated something incredibly fundamental

that we hadn't really understood before.

[pensive music]

- [Narrator] Mendel was puzzled

by the concept of family resemblances.

- Everyone was very comfortable

with the idea that somehow or other

we resembled our parents.

You only have to look at some of the portraits

of some of the Royal families from the European communities

to see those features ran in families.

But nobody knew how,

it was just thought we sort of somehow just did.

- [Narrator] Over seven years,

Mendel grew and studied 28,000 pea plants,

carefully recording the shape, size and color

of their flowers, seeds and seed pods,

even their height.

- Mendel was able to show

that whether or not the pea passed on

being wrinkly or smooth had nothing to do

with whether the pea passed on whether it was tall

or whether it was short.

What that demonstrated was that we as organisms

pass on separate bits of inheritance as discrete units.

In human terms that's a bit like realizing that for example,

you could inherit your mother's nose shape,

but you could inherit your father's ear shape.

It showed that they weren't all connected.

- [Narrator] Mendel concluded

that these discrete units of information

dictate what we inherit.

[pensive music]

Over the following century,

scientists discovered these units are in fact genes.

They operate inside the nucleus of every cell.

And they're a combination

of just four chemical building blocks

known as nucleotides or bases.

They are adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine,

or simply A, C, G and T.

- It's so simple and yet it gives rise

to the amazing organisms, which are us.

- [Narrator] The human genome consists of these four letters

repeated 3 billion times.

During the first half of the 20th century,

scientists begin to suspect

the order in which they're arranged,

dictates how the code creates each and every one of us,

from the color of our eyes to aspects of our personality.

But they've no idea how the letters are arranged.

Until 1953, when the patrons of a Cambridge pub

were disturbed by two young molecular biologists

declaring they'd found the secret of life.

The pub regulars had no idea of what that would mean

for both science and humanity.

The two scientists, American James Watson

and Briton Francis Crick, had made a discovery

that would revolutionize the understanding

of human genetics.

They had worked out the structure of DNA

or deoxyribonucleic acid.

For the first time they understood

how the four letters, A, C, G and T

were placed in the now iconic helical structure.

- When Watson and Crick figured out

what the structure of DNA was,

it became clear that the letters weren't just a jumble,

they actually had a specific order.

And that order has information, it's like computer code.

You know, you have a string of zeros and ones

in computer code, and it's the order of those zeros and ones

that have the information.

Nucleic acids are simply the letters,

they contain the information.

Instead of a binary code it's a four letter code.

- [Narrator] Watson and Crick's groundbreaking work

might have finally unlocked the structure of DNA.

But cracking its code

and working out which combination

of As, Cs, Gs and Ts pass on which characteristics

was a whole different ballgame.

- By the 70s we knew the helical structure of DNA,

we knew that four bases

carried the genetic code essentially.

The problem was we didn't have a method

to read the letters.

- [Narrator] Scientists had discovered the book of life,

but they still couldn't read it.

[upbeat music]

As news spread of Watson and Crick's incredible discovery,

another Cambridge based scientist

was about to turbo boost the quest to decode human DNA.

Brilliant biochemist, Fred Sanger,

already a Nobel prize winner in chemistry

for his work on the structure of proteins,

begins to look into the problem of reading the code of life.

But he doesn't start with human DNA,

his genius is to solve this huge puzzle by thinking small.

- Most of us when we think of something that's fairly small,

we might think about a bacterium,

if we're thinking about something with its own DNA.

But Fred Sanger thought even smaller.

- This is phiX174, a virus so small it infects bacteria.

The DNA of this so-called bacteria phage

is made of just 5400 of the four nucleotides A, C, G and T.

- The advantage of using something like a bacteria phage

is that its genome is very small

and also you can grow lots of the bacteria phage in the lab,

so you can get lots and lots and lots of the DNA to work on

and it will all be exactly the same DNA.

And that was the real breakthrough.

[pensive music]

- [Narrator] Sanger duplicates the bacteria's DNA,

but uses a chemical

which stops the replication process randomly

when a specific one of the four nucleotides occurs.

For example adenine,

that gives him lots of different lengths of DNA,

each ending in an A that he can compare.

He then uses a process called electrophoresis,

which separates out each of the strands of DNA

by dragging them through a gel.

- Gel is just a structure that slows down molecules

when you pass an electric current across it.

And the ones that are very small will move really fast,

and the ones that are very big will move much more slowly.

So they're all separated based on their length.

- [Narrator] None of this process

is visible to the naked eye,

so a photographic film is placed over the gel.

X-ray photography illuminates radioactive markers

placed on the end of each fragment,

revealing the positions of all the A nucleotides

in the strand of DNA.

The process is then repeated

for the remaining three nucleotides, C, G and T.

Finally, the letters can be put together

and the complete sequence of DNA can be read.

[dramatic music]

But this is just one tiny fragment of the viral genome.

So Sanger repeats the process over and over again.

- The challenge was then how could he piece

these different fragments of DNA together

to get back to the sequence of the genome.

- [Narrator] Sanger decides to look for overlaps

between the sequence sections.

He uses a technique common to other code breakers,

sliding the code around until he finds a match.

- So that you'd get to the end of one region

and the start of another,

and you could see where they overlapped

and then you could line them up against each other.

- [Narrator] It's painstaking work

fraught with difficulties due to large numbers

of identical, repetitive sequences,

and the small size of the fragments.

But after 17 long years,

in 1977 Sanger finally cracks the code.

- These two pieces

must have actually come from a similar page,

they have the same text in them, they share text.

- [Narrator] The entire genome of the tiny virus

can now be read in full.

- Fred Sanger showed that you could find out

the entire genetic sequence of an organism.

So that was the first time that was ever really done.

That was an extraordinary achievement.

[dramatic music]

- [Narrator] The invention of genetic sequencing

wins Sanger his second Nobel prize.

The Sanger technique is a game changer.

Science now has the tool needed

to crack the human genetic code.

[bright upbeat music]

By the late 1980s, scientific advances had made it possible

to read up to 500 DNA letters at a time.

But it's still a very long way

from reading the 3 billion bases

that make up the human genome.

- We were just beginning

to be able to decode the letters of DNA,

but it was on a scale that was minuscule

compared to the scale that would be required for the genome.

- There was considerable skepticism amongst scientists

that this was something worthy

of being called a scientific project.

[dramatic music]

- [Narrator] But at a lab in St. Louis

one scientist is edging closer

to realizing the impossible dream.

Bob Waterston is analyzing the genome

of a tiny parasitic worm,

with more than 37,000 times more bases

than Fred Sanger's bacteria phage.

- In the 80s I was starting to work on the map of a worm.

We could see that what we were doing with the worm

would work on humans.

[dramatic music]

- [Narrator] Waterston is one of a small

but growing number of scientists

beginning to suspect the impossible dream

of decoding the human genome might soon be possible.

[dramatic music]

The problem is it will take a vast amount of time and money.

- When it was first broached to a fair fraction

of the biological community, it just seemed madness.

- There were a lot of questions.

It was going to be big, but it was gonna consume the money.

[dramatic music]

- [Narrator] Fortunately, there's one investor

with the vision to realize the potential benefits

of decoding the human genome,

and has the deep pockets to fund it.

[dramatic music]

The US government.

On October 1st, 1990, Congress puts up $3 billion

to fund the most ambitious

biological research project in history,

decoding the entire human genome.

- It was going to be big.

Inside the molecular biology community

there was a great deal of excitement

about what could happen,

but also the feeling that the goal was a long way away.

- [Narrator] It's a vast project,

but the money will fund an international effort for 15 years

Scientists in the US, UK, Japan, France, Germany, and China

are now all working together to try to crack the human code.

- The human genome is everybody's heritage,

and I think it was crucial

to have representatives from different parts of the world

involved in this project so that it became humanity's genome

- [Narrator] In America

the work is spearheaded by James Watson,

one half of Crick and Watson,

and biologist, Bob Waterston.

In Britain, Nobel prize winner and biologist, John Sulston

is also putting together a crack team.

By chance he meets sequencing specialist, Jane Rogers.

- I was working in London.

I had a young family at the time

and I'd asked the medical research council

if there were any posts in Cambridge,

rather than commuting into London.

- [Narrator] Sulston is putting together a proposal

for a state of the art research facility

dedicated to unlocking the human genome.

- And after a couple of glasses

of Sherry on an empty stomach,

he felt that I was a very suitable candidate for the job,

and we put the proposal together.

- [Narrator] In 1992 on the outskirts of Cambridge,

The Sanger Center,

named in honor of the father of DNA sequencing,

opens its doors.

[dramatic music]

- [Announcer] In the grounds of Hinxton Hall,

the new Wellcome Trust genome campus has been created.

- And at that point, we did look at each other

and say, "Oh, now we've got to do it."

- [Announcer] The Sanger Center is currently being scaled up

and the human genome sequencing project,

a vast global initiative,

is scheduled to be completed by the year 2005.

- [Narrator] The Human Genome Project

has world class facilities,

and the world's best molecular biologists.

But there's one major problem;

- We could only see 500 letters at a time,

and that's being generous.

Maybe it was closer to 300 when we started.

- At the time that this project starts in development,

we don't even think we have the technology

to make it capable.

It is an enormous undertaking.

- [Narrator] And it's not just the sequencing technology

that isn't up to the job.

Basic computing power is nowhere near what's needed

for the task ahead.

- Personal computers were a very new thing.

I can remember having a little old box, Apple,

and that was the most modern technology.

And I don't know what its power was

but it was a fraction of what you find in a computer

or an iPhone today.

- I had a little IBM PC on my desktop,

you know, I have more computing power in my watch.

But we knew what we were doing at the start

was not gonna be good enough to get the job done.

- [Narrator] But Waterston, Rogers

and the rest of the international team

know the stakes are now so high, they can't stop.

They can only hope advances in technology

will come to their rescue.

[dramatic music]

- People knew that the genome was the information behind us,

and if we could understand that we could manipulate it.

We could change it to keep people from having disease,

we could begin to think about how biology actually works,

and could we redesign things.

- [Narrator] Knowing their work

could impact every aspect of human existence,

the scientists set to work.

Their first job is to create a map

to help navigate through the human genome.

- The genome is amazingly complex and hard to work with.

It's like looking down at the earth from a satellite.

It's there but you can't see any details.

So what people wanted to do was put markers, landmarks.

- [Narrator] The teams hunt for these landmarks

by comparing small sections of DNA

from multiple individual samples.

When a section of one strand of DNA

is different to another sample, which should be identical,

it's a sign there may be something significant

in that region of the human genome.

This landmark can then be plotted in relation to others,

creating a map of potentially interesting locations.

[dramatic music]

The teams begin to join up the dots,

but with multiple laboratories

working across 3 billion bases,

it quickly becomes clear each team needs a specific aim.

- Our lab had actually sequenced

the same exact piece of DNA that another lab had sequenced.

We didn't know it.

It was like having a car crash

out in the middle of the desert.

We've got the whole human genome to sequence

and here we are running into each other.

And so we had to figure out how to share things equitably.

[upbeat music]

- [Narrator] Conveniently,

the human genome is already subdivided into smaller strands

inside every cell.

These are chromosomes, each cell contains 23 pairs.

They keep the DNA tightly woven

and play a critical role in ensuring DNA is copied

and distributed correctly during cell division.

- Chromosomes are relatively simple to isolate

in a pretty pure form,

so you can work on chromosome one

or chromosome two and so on.

- [Narrator] The Human Genome Project's international teams

share out the chromosomes.

This helps to streamline the workflow,

but it doesn't reduce the amount of work,

because each chromosome still has hundreds of millions

of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts,

all of which need to be identified.

And the clock is ticking.

They have just 15 years of funding

to crack the code of human life.

[dramatic music]

Cracking the entire genome in just 15 years

is impossibly fast in science terms.

So the team is forced to come up

with a new and faster way of working.

- It was much more effective

if each individual was only responsible

for a small part of the process,

they only had to learn a little bit

and become really expert at that one little bit.

This is changing it into really an assembly line process,

where somebody's responsible for putting the doors on

and somebody else is putting the seats in.

- [Narrator] And this new way of working

requires a new kind of workforce.

- Very often we were advertising in the local newspapers

for people with technical skills,

and people who had skills in needle work, embroidery,

'cause they had good eyesight

or, and good hand-eye coordination.

Or people who were good at hacking computers

were, you know, often top of our list

for people who were excellent candidates for this.

- [Narrator] But not all of the human genome team are human.

To the bemusement of some,

robots take on jobs once handled

by highly trained scientists.

- Many biologists at the time this was going on

felt that this was not something they wanted to do,

this was not real science, this was technology.

Eventually this was a fully industrialized process

like building a car.

- [Narrator] For those now on the front line

of this new brand of science, their work is trailblazing.

- Every once in a while,

I'd be looking at my computer

and I'd look at the string of As, Gs, Cs and Ts

that we just discovered for this part of the genome

and I couldn't help but think, you know, wow.

This has been 4 billion years in the making,

and here I am, the first human ever to see this bit.

There was this sense, this is what we need to know,

and here I am, I'm seeing this for the first time.

- [Narrator] Letter by pain staking letter,

the human genome team is revealing the code of life.

The specific combinations of As, Cs, Gs and Ts

that together make up our genes and make us who we are.

[dramatic music]

By 1994, four years into the project,

15,000 genes had been identified on the human genome.

And two years after that,

the team has started to pinpoint mutated genes

responsible for life threatening diseases

passed down from generation to generation.

- There had been a number of genetic diseases

identified by that point,

but we didn't know the molecular biology behind them.

We didn't know the molecules.

In a few months time,

we had the DNA for polycystic kidney disease,

and now the people studying polycystic kidney disease

could begin to understand

how polycystic kidney disease came about.

- [Narrator] In 1996,

the team identifies and locates

the genes for Parkinson's disease and for prostate cancer.

This breakthrough is the first step

in allowing scientists to screen for these diseases,

potentially even eliminating them altogether in the future.

But despite these successes,

the international team of scientists

has unraveled less than 1% of the 3 billion letter code.

[dramatic music]

They're approaching the halfway point in the project

and there's still 99% of the code left to crack.

[dramatic music]

The team urgently needs to pick up the pace,

but something is slowing them down.

The scientific process itself.

- When you are a research scientist, you generate data.

You repeat the experiment three times

and it's only once you've crosschecked,

you know, weeks or years of data,

you then write it up, publish.

- So we could have the sequence

that might be usable for somebody studying a human gene,

and it might be a year or two years

before that sequence actually

would have been in the public domain

for people to be able to use the sequence.

- [Narrator] This slow and secretive process

is a major problem for the Human Genome Project.

- Usually cracking a code, you want to keep it secret.

You know, if you crack it

you don't want whoever's code you're cracking

to find out about it.

With the genome, it's the opposite problem.

You need everyone working in tandem

or the whole thing becomes inefficient.

Inefficiency means more expense, means more time.

[dramatic music]

- [Narrator] But time is something the team doesn't have.

[dramatic music]

The solution to cracking the human code more quickly

is found in an unlikely place.

The small island of Bermuda.

Better known as a paradise holiday destination,

in 1996 it's the unusual location

for a revolutionary meeting

that will change scientific research forever.

- If it was in Washington, the US would hold too much sway,

it would be on our home turf.

And they didn't think they'd get good enough participation

if they held it somewhere in Europe.

So they found a place that was in the middle of the ocean.

- Michael Morgan, the head of the Human Genome Project

for Britain's Wellcome Trust,

has a plan for speeding up the project's progress,

but it goes against everything

the scientific community believes in.

So he's invited the project's top scientists to Bermuda

in the hope of persuading them

to share their precious unpublished research

with the entire scientific community.

- If you had two kilo bases of sequence data,

which is a tiny amount by modern standards,

you would put it on the internet

with no restrictions on its use.

[dramatic music]

- It was very unusual to release data

and have no idea what would happen to it,

because once it's in the public data sources,

anyone can use it

and you can't control what other people do with it.

- If we're going to make progress on understanding it,

everybody had to be able to work on it freely.

You need the whole thing and you need free access to it.

- At the end of the discussion, I called for a show of hands

of support for these principles.

And I was unaware of anybody not raising their hand.

[enchanting music]

- [Narrator] The multinational team

reaches a revolutionary agreement.

- It was agreed that data would be released on a daily basis

with no restrictions on its use,

the so-called Bermuda Principles.

- We would share the sequence information

as we were generating it,

and it would actually serve as a resource for the world.

- The human genome team believes collaboration

is the key to solving the code of DNA.

But not everyone abides by the principles

and the future of the entire project

is about to be put in danger.

[dramatic music]

Eight years into the project,

with time and money running out,

Michael Morgan receives some alarming news.

[dramatic music]

- There was going to be a major announcement

of a new sequencing effort

funded by commercial entities in the states

that would have a major impact on the genome project.

- [Narrator] A biotech company called Celera,

plans to take a radically different approach

to cracking the human code.

- It was a very sexy model

because it involved fancy bioinformatics, lots of computing,

techniques that really hadn't been done before.

It was exciting.

- [Narrator] The technique is less accurate,

but also potentially faster and cheaper.

And that makes it a major threat

to the funding from the US government.

- In the US, the government is supposed to fund

things that companies are not likely to do.

And so there was a worry that Congress would pull the plug.

[dramatic music]

- [Narrator] Without the Human Genome Project on the scene,

Celera would be free to do exactly what it wants

with the code of life.

And what it wants is to make money.

- Part of the model of Celera

was to encourage companies to buy a subscription

so that they would have first look of the sequence data.

And a number of major pharmaceutical companies

had signed up to this.

- And so people would pay to get access to it,

and that's not how science should work.

[dramatic music]

- [Narrator] Access to the code for individual genes

would be sold to the highest bidder.

- But you couldn't share it with others,

and you were supposed to inform Celera

of any discoveries you made about it.

- [Narrator] If Celera's faster

and cheaper sequencing wins out,

it means a private company would in effect

own the human genome.

- They wanted to be the world's resource

for information about genomes,

and that's how they were gonna make money out of it.

[pensive music]

- [Narrator] To the scientists and administrators

of the Human Genome Project,

Celera's plan represents a major threat,

not just to the project, but to the code of life itself.

- The genome is a basic resource.

It's something that is rich in information,

but will take really concerted effort

to understand what's going on with each piece of the genome.

The way science works is that people play off one another.

You have to have interactions.

I felt like we had to maintain an effort

that would lead to a path where the sequence was available

without constraint to the world.

- The human genome sequence

is the common inheritance of mankind

and nobody, nobody should own it.

It should be available for everybody to work on

so that the benefits go to everybody.

[dramatic music]

- [Narrator] On March 12th, 1998,

less than a week after Celera's shock announcement,

a conference on the human genome begins

at James Watson's Cold Spring Harbor laboratory

on Long Island.

- [Jane] The mood was extremely anxious.

- There was a fair amount of despair.

A lot of people were down at the mouth.

- What should we do?

How can we take this forward?

- There was just all kinds of politics floating around

and how to tactically respond.

Did we just continue with the way we were doing things?

Did we have to shift?

And so there was a lot of uncertainty,

there was just a lot of anxiety.

[dramatic music]

- [Narrator] Then on the last day of the conference,

there's a surprise guest speaker,

and he may be the salvation, not only of the project,

but of humanity owning its own code.

- I walked into the auditorium,

not only was there not a seat available,

but every corridor and passageway was crammed with people.

I hadn't seen anything like it before.

It was quite a moment.

[dramatic music]

- [Narrator] Once again,

Michael Morgan may have the solution to the problem.

- I was very aware that what I said

was going to have an important impact.

- [Narrator] As the Wellcome Trust's

Director of molecular research,

Morgan has access to a vast cash resource,

because clever investments have made the charity rich.

- The Wellcome trust was likened by a colleague,

to an 800 pound gorilla

that could pretty much do whatever it wanted to do

and what it chose to do.

Our value at that time

would've been in the 2 to 3, 4 billion.

- [Narrator] What the audience wants to know

is where this scientific gorilla

is going to throw its weight.

- I made a presentation

and basically said that the Wellcome Trust

would not stand by and allow this private organization

to sequence the human genome,

and if necessary we'd fund the whole thing.

[audience applauds]

- And the crowd just erupted.

- [Narrator] It's a bombshell announcement.

If the US government pulls the plug

on the Human Genome Project,

the Wellcome Trust will step in and pick up the tab.

If all the other funding bodies around the world pull out,

the Wellcome Trust will pick up their tabs too.

- Nobody in the audience was left in doubt

that we would be able and were able

to fulfill our commitment to fund the whole genome project.

- He was very, very pugnacious,

very upfront about taking on this challenge.

- There had been a threat to the Human Genome Project,

but there was a knight on a white horse basically

who was stepping in and coming to the rescue.

[Michael chuckles]

[dramatic music]

- [Narrator] The Wellcome Trust

has secured the future of the Human Genome Project,

but the threat of big business stealing their thunder

is still very real.

- There was definitely a race

as far as the media was concerned.

And there was definitely a race

as far as the scientists who were directly involved

in either Celera or the Human Genome Project were concerned.

- We, I think were portrayed

as being the, you know, old fashioned luddites

plotting through the same old stuff,

and that was so difficult to counter.

I mean, if I try and tell somebody from the press

that the Celera approach isn't guaranteed success,

whereas we can get to the end eventually,

it makes us sound boring.

[dramatic music]

- [Narrator] Despite the negative publicity,

in November, 1999, the Human Genome Project team

successfully reads its billionth letter.

Just a month later,

they announced the completion of the sequencing

of the first whole chromosome, chromosome 22.

- It was a big deal,

everybody felt they had achieved something.

Everybody felt part of it, and that this was something

that they were very, very proud of.

- [Narrator] But this is more than just a milestone

in the race to crack the code of life.

Chromosome 22 carries genes linked to schizophrenia,

leukemia, heart disease, breast cancer,

and a host of other diseases and conditions.

- We knew that we could use that sequence

to help us identify those kinds of rare conditions.

And we would never be able to find those out

unless we knew

what a normal human genome sequence looked like.

- [Narrator] This major breakthrough

is a shot in the arm for the human genome team,

and in the weeks and months following it,

the rate of discovery gets faster and faster.

Just four months later in April, 2000,

the team successfully reads their 2 billionth letter.

- We certainly didn't think we could do it in 1990

when we started out, but we just kept getting better,

and the technology just kept getting better.

And that incremental change just led us to be confident

that we could do it.

[dramatic music]

- [Narrator] Meanwhile Celera continues

with its own sequencing plan,

but the company plays its cards

and its data very close to its chest.

- We were up against it

because Celera had press releases

that made it look like it was miles ahead

of anything that the public effort was doing.

- So nobody in the public domain

could see the Celera data, but our data was freely available

in the public databases for them to see.

- [Narrator] Tensions are mounting and tempers are fraying.

- Sometimes the press got unpleasant

and it wasn't doing science any good.

It didn't portray science in a good light to the public.

[dramatic music]

- [Narrator] The public rivalry

has caught the attention of US President, Bill Clinton.

- By March, 2000, Clinton wrote a note

to his science advisor, telling him to fix this.

- [Narrator] The result of this intervention

is an historic agreement.

On June 26th, 2000,

[audience applauds]

President, Bill Clinton and UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair,

bring the two waring sides together

to formally announce to the world

that the first draft of the human genome is complete.

- The announcement of draft genome sequence

was something of a compromise.

There was sequence covering over 99% of the human genome,

but the quality was not at the standard

that we were aiming for.

- We were in the east room of the White House

and there was Bill Clinton.

- I congratulate all of you

on this stunning and humbling achievement.

- Clinton talked about a map for humankind

and how wonderful it was.

- Today we are learning the language

in which God created life.

- It was pretty smutty, but it was also pretty amazing.

- [Narrator] But what every member

of the human genome team really wants to know

is how much of the human code their biotech rival

has really cracked.

- [Waterston] We still didn't know what Celera had produced.

- We are announcing today for the first time,

our species can read the chemical letters

of its genetic code.

[dramatic music]

- [Narrator] After months of speculation,

the truth is about to be revealed.

Part of the agreement is that the two sides

will publish their results simultaneously.

Bob Waterston and the rest of the human genome team

will finally get to see just how much

of the human genome code Celera has unraveled.

- And frankly, I was elated.

We had about the same quality sequence, it really was a tie.

So that was really excellent news.

- [Narrator] In real terms,

it's a win for the Human Genome Project.

With the teams neck and neck

pharmaceutical companies are unwilling to pay

for Celera's sequence data

when they can get it from the Human Genome Project for free.

- It was the nail in the coffin

for Celera's ambitions to make a lot of money.

[pensive music]

- [Narrator] Over the following months,

Celera quietly abandons its plans

for a private library of humanity's code.

It now falls to the publicly funded team

to fill in the last remaining gaps

and complete the code once and for all.

In April, 2003, 13 years after the project began,

the human genome team finally publishes the code of life

they've worked tirelessly to decode.

But it takes until March, 2022

for every last one of the 3 billion letters

to be fully sequenced.

- It was a lot of work, long days,

challenging me in ways that I certainly didn't expect

to be challenged when I started out in this career.

- It was enormously exciting at the time.

I had to do things that I never dreamed

that I would ever have to do.

- Despite all the challenges, despite the dark times,

we were confident we could get it done.

And we did.

[bright upbeat music]

- [Narrator] The entire code of life is posted online,

available to all for free.

- It's just available to anybody and everybody

across the world without constraint.

- That my mom could have looked up

the human genome sequence,

I think that was fantastic.

That was really the point

at which I realized

how much this was going to change biology.

And we came to a conclusion that has been transformative.

I am very proud that I was part of it.

- [Narrator] Cracking the human genome code

has revolutionized science.

It now offers scientists a new and decisive weapon

in the fight against disease, including cancer.

- What's been enormously gratifying

was to see how genome sequence

has enabled the science of biology to go in new directions,

to go at a speed and precision

that I just didn't see it 20 years ago.

- Now we can actually compare sequences of cancer cells

from an individual

with the sequences of normal cells

and pinpoint where the problems are.

[siren wailing]

- The human genome makes it so much easier

to show people who are the perpetrators of crime,

or you could argue more importantly,

exonerating people who had been imprisoned

before DNA evidence became available.

- [Narrator] Unlocking the human code

has enlightened our past.

- We can extract DNA from ancient humans,

such as Neanderthals tools or Denisovans,

and we can start to understand where we fit in

to the wider human family.

- [Narrator] And it's helping to secure

the future of humanity.

- Look at how we've dealt with the recent COVID 19 outbreak.

Without the sequencing technology,

we would be completely struggling and in the dark.

So many benefits, and many, many more to come.

- It's now directly affecting people's lives for the better.

That's a fantastic achievement.

- [Narrator] It took thousands of scientists

over a decade of intense work to decode the human genome.

But today it can be done in a matter of hours.

Now, thanks to Mendel's peas,

Watson and Crick's research, Sanger sequencing,

and the extraordinary ingenuity

and persistence of the Human Genome Project,

we can see the complete picture and read the code of life.

- The human genome is spectacular.

It's an amazing code.

[bright upbeat music]