In the late 1970s, geneticist Robert Strausberg was an oddity. Instead of studying a single protein or gene, he focused on the expression patterns of the yeast mitochondrial genome. It was his first inkling of “what we could do if we had complete genomic information, though it wasn’t being done at that time,” recalls Strausberg, then at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Dallas.
A decade and a half later, Strausberg would tap back into that knowledge when James Watson invited him to the National Institutes of Health to lead the sequencing technology development program for the Human Genome Project (HGP). After he left the HGP, Strausberg initiated the National Cancer Institute’s genomics project in 1997, and was soon an omics maestro, organizing ...
