The Gene: An Intimate History

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Earlier, Walter Gilbert, the DNA-sequencing pioneer, had prepared an edge-of-napkin calculation of the costs and personnel involved. To sequence all 3 billion base pairs of human DNA, Gilbert estimated, would take about fifty thousand person years and cost around $3 billion—one dollar per base. As Gilbert, with characteristic panache, strode across the floor to inscribe the number on a chalkboard, an intense debate broke out in the audience. “Gilbert’s number”—which would turn out to be start lingly accurate—had reduced the genome project to tangible realities. Indeed, put in perspective, the cost was not even particularly large: at its peak, the Apollo program had employed nearly four hundred thousand people, with a total cumulative cost of about $100 billion. If Gilbert was right, the human genome could be had for less than one-thirtieth of the moon landing. Sydney Brenner later joked that the sequencing of the human genome would perhaps ultimately be limited not by cost or technology, but only by the severe monotony of its labor. Perhaps, he speculated, genome sequencing should be doled out as a punishment to criminals and convicts—1 million bases for robbery, 2 million for homicide, 10 million for murder.