FILE - A technician places an array containing DNA information in a scanner. (GREG BAKER/AFP via Getty Images)Nearly 100 scientists rallied together to complete the first-ever completed human genome sequence, creating the first-ever blueprint for human life.
On April 1, contributors from the Telomere-to-Telomere (T2T) Consortium managed to sequence the remaining 8% of the human genome, an effort left over from the Human Genome Project (HGP).
HGP was started in 1988 by a special committee of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and was an international, collaborative research program whose goal was the complete mapping and understanding of all the genes of human beings.
Beginning on October 1, 1990, and completed in April 2003, the HGP gave people the ability to read nature's complete genetic blueprint for building a human being, according to the National Human Genome Research Institute.