From a joint plan to international sequencing
President Bill Clinton, Francis Collins (NHGRI) and Craig Venter at the 26 June 2000 announcement of the working draft. NHGRI photo, public-domain status indicated on Wikimedia Commons; creator and date credited. No edits. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IHGSC_Human_Genome_Project_Draft_Completion_Announcement_-_June_2000.jpg
The NIH and U.S. Department of Energy officially began the project on 1 October 1990 with an initial 15-year plan. Its aims included determining the sequence of about 3.2 billion “letters” of human DNA, developing analysis methods, and studying model organisms. The later international sequencing consortium included hundreds of scientists at 20 centers in six countries; the Sanger Centre was one of them. A working draft was announced in 2000, and the project was declared complete in 2003, two years before its original target. Completion of the HGP should not be confused with the later production of a fully continuous sequence without gaps.