What 2,500 Sequenced Genomes Say about Humanity’s Future
By Lizzie Wade,
Wired
| 09. 30. 2015
When the geneticist Gonçalo Abecasis stood up in front of a group of scientists in 2007 and proposed sequencing 1,000 genomes from people all over the world, he had no idea how he was going to pull it off. The Human Genome Project had published the first complete map of the human genome just four years earlier, and the technology remained exorbitantly expensive. “Imagine you’ve done ten of these,” Abecasis says today of the number of human genomes that had been sequenced at the time. “The first one cost $3 billion, and the other ones cost several million. And you say, ‘what if we set out to do a thousand?’”
The price wasn’t the only hurdle. “When we first started talking about doing these genome-wide comparisons between populations”—i.e., groups of people from different continents or with different ancestries—“there was a lot of tension,” remembers Abecasis, now at the University of Michigan. That’s because, frankly, “human population” sounds a lot like “race.”
Sequencing the human genome showed that humans are all much more alike than different; genome pioneer J. Craig Venter...
Related Articles
By Jeffrey Gettleman and Maya Tekeli, The New York Times | 09.24.2025
For some Greenlanders, sorry isn’t enough.
The prime minister of Denmark, Mette Frederiksen, made a special visit Wednesday to Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, to apologize in person for a traumatic chapter in Greenlandic history, when Danish doctors forced birth control on...
By Emma McDonald Kennedy
| 09.25.2025
In the leadup to the 2024 election, Donald Trump repeatedly promised to make IVF more accessible. He made the commitment central to his campaign, even referring to himself as the “father of IVF.” In his first month in office, Trump issued an executive order promising to expand IVF access. The order set a 90-day deadline for policy recommendations for “lowering costs and reducing barriers to IVF,” although it didn’t make any substantive reproductive healthcare policy changes.
The response to the...
By Marianne Lamers, NEMO Kennislink [cites CGS' Katie Hasson] | 09.23.2025
Een rijtje gespreide vulva’s gaapt de bezoeker aan. Zó ziet een bevalling eruit, en zó een baarmoeder met foetus. Een zwangerschap, maar dan zonder zwangere vrouw, gestript van zorgen, gêne en pijn. De zwangerschapsmodellen en oefenbekkens, te zien in de...
By Johana Bhuiyan, The Guardian | 09.23.2025
In March 2021, a 25-year-old US citizen was traveling through Chicago’s Midway airport when they were stopped by US border patrol agents. Though charged with no crime, the 25-year-old was subjected to a cheek swab to collect their DNA, which...