Sir John Sulston

The race between the public (International Human Genome Consortium) and private (Celera) efforts to sequence the human genome was relatively fierce by scientific standards. But as last month's publications in Science and Nature show, the two groups crossed the finishing line together. Nature Medicine talked to the man who, as part of the Consortium, lead the Sanger Centre in Cambridge, UK, through this historical time to sequence the second largest part of the genome outside the US.