Credit: Eric Hanson

This year may be remembered as the year of the personal genome. Last month, two companies announced plans to decode the genomes of individual human beings. A company in Branford, CT, 454 Life Sciences, is sequencing the genome of James Watson, the codiscoverer of the structure of DNA and an eminent figure in the genomics field (see "Sequencing in a Flash"). And Illumina, a DNA analysis company headquartered in San Diego, CA, is sequencing the genome of one of the Yoruba people participating in the international HapMap project, the first effort to probe the structure of diversity in the human genome on a large scale (see "Genes, Medicine, and the New Race Debate," June 2003).

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