The UK effort
Double Nobel prizewinner Fred Sanger was the first person to read the complete DNA sequence of an organism - a virus - in 1978. Now, the Sanger Centre, based near Cambridge in the UK, is the largest single participant in the Human Genome Project. Scientists there aim to read one billion base pairs of DNA, a third of the entire human genome. Before tackling the human genome, the Centre's director John Sulston perfected the technology on the roundworm genome: a mere 100 million base pairs of DNA in length!
