In 1990, the U.S. government launched the largest and most ambitious biology project ever conceived: the mapping of the human genome. Led by the Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health, the project had a budget of $2 billion and soon came to involve more than 350 laboratories around the world. The goal was to complete the map by 2005.
A version of this article appeared in the March–April 2000 issue of Harvard Business Review.