Francis Collins: I think that prediction was correct. It is turning out to be the most significant organized scientific enterprise that humankind has mounted, at least up until now, to read our own instruction book. Sure, going to the moon was a huge deal. I’m a big fan of space science. Splitting the atom, all kinds of consequences, some of them a little worrisome but still very important for understanding really fundamentals about how matter is put together. But the Human Genome Project was about us. It was about all of us. It was understanding how it is that our DNA instruction book is capable of taking a single cell, which we all once were, and producing this incredibly complex, amazing, mysterious organism called a human being and how that can go really well, or how sometimes things go wrong and illness occurs. Now we are not done with that adventure, but the Human Genome Project basically said we’re seriously crossing this bridge. We’re into a territory where we know that fundamental information about our own instruction book. We’re never going back, and we did it, and life has changed for science immeasurably and for medicine bit by bit. We are seeing increasing consequences of that knowledge, and it’s only going to grow more profound with every passing year.