We've come a long way from the Babbling Brook Inn. That's the hostelry in Santa Cruz, Calif., where a handful of dreamers-and a few skeptics-gathered in May of 1985 and hatched what ultimately evolved into the Human Genome Project. You'd never guess by the hosannas of press coverage in June, when the first rough draft of the human sequence was announced, that the idea initially had struck everyone as ridiculous.

To those of us who have watched this effort unfold over the past 15 years, it's been surprising, and a little demoralizing, to see the early history of the project subsumed in the entrepreneurial brinksmanship, historical amnesia and Orwellian newspeak of contemporary science.