By next year, biologists are scheduled to finish sequencing the entire set of human genes. The Human Genome Project has been a mammoth endeavor involving thousands of scientists and billions of dollars. But for Peter Schultz, the real fun-understanding how all those genes function-is just beginning.

Last year, Schultz quit as chemistry professor at the University of California, Berkeley, to start up the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Foundation at La Jolla, California. The purpose of the $250 million institute, funded by the Novartis Research Foundation (a Swiss foundation with close ties to pharmaceutical giant Novartis) is to elucidate the biological meaning of the hundreds of thousands of genes detailed by the genome project. The work of assembling that puzzle is known as functional genomics, and Schultz leaves no doubt that he expects his institute to lead this race to understand, molecule by molecule, how the human body works.