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In 1990, the Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health

launched a massive undertaking called the Human Genome Project.

People in the biology community and the genetics community refer to it as a moon shot for biology, if you will,

kind of on par with the Apollo mission.

Because for the first time ever, scientists were going to sequence the human genome as fully as possible.

That is, they were going to read all of the DNA from a person that kind of makes us a person.

Ashley Smart is a senior editor at Undark magazine where he recently wrote about this

landmark effort.

Genetic sequencing and testing may be widely available nowadays.

But back then it was something wildly unprecedented and

something hugely ambitious. Which is why the Human Genome Project took several

scientific teams over a decade and three billion dollars to complete.

But there's one part of the legacy that Ashley believes doesn't get talked about enough.

And that is the donors.

To sequence human DNA, you need actual DNA from humans.

And so one of the questions that people have been asking

...