Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2001, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My costaway this week is a scientist. His work has supported the greatest breakthrough in our understanding of human development since Darwin's theory of evolution.

He's led this country's contribution to the Human Genome project, the mapping and sequencing of our

molecular structure which provides us with the basic information we need to

completely transform our ability to cure disease. Historic achievements sometimes have mundane beginnings, and so it was with this case.

30 years ago, he shut himself away for 18 months and watched worms hatch.

His painstaking research provided the basis for

today's momentous discovery. In a world constantly attuned to the possibility of

commercial advantage he's remained passionate in his belief that

information should be shared. The human genome discoveries he believes celebrate

our understanding of life and also he says freedom of access for all the hundreds and thousands of

individual scientists on every continent. He is Sir John Salston. So have you

John actually held the book of life in your hand?

Yes I have in the draft form that we have it's as yet incomplete we shall be completing it

over the next couple of years but I've held it in the form really of a CD-ROM on the sort of thing you might put into your computer to play a game.

We can write the instructions to make a human being on that disk.

But a huge amount of information, if you were to put that in a book.

In books it would be something like 30,000 ordinary novels to write it out all those letters.

But we can't actually usefully read this stuff.

It doesn't come nicely laid out in words and

paragraphs that we can understand. It's one long sentence. One long

...