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.

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