The announcement today of the 2002 International Gairdner Awards (sponsored by Genome Canada) honors eight individuals central to the success of the Human Genome Project. The citation highlights their "major original and pioneering contributions, both fundamental and applied to our understanding of mammalian and other genomes." In a field to which so many have contributed, the precise merits of the winners seem likely to occupy many fine minds in coming weeks.
The General Genome Citation is broken down into three areas: Maynard Olson, James Watson and Jean Weissenbach are recognized as the "early architects"; Eric Lander, John Sulston, Robert Waterston and Craig Venter are honored for their "seminal contributions to sequencing of human and other genomes"; and the bioinformaticians Philip Green and Michael Waterman receive the award for developing the computational molecular biology tools that were vital for analyzing the enormous amount of data generated by the sequencing projects. "The ...
