On February 6, 2007, executives from 454 Life Sciences showed 78-year-old James Watson a first draft of his own genome. There was something downright poetic about this. Watson, of course, had won a Nobel Prize 45 years earlier for his role in discovering the double-helical structure of DNA; he was also a prime mover behind the Human Genome Project, which by its completion in 2005 had spent nearly $3 billion over 15 years extracting the blueprint that those helices encode. Now 454 had moved a step beyond that mega-project, which pooled many people's DNA to determine the genetic sequence of what amounts to a model human. The company and its so-called next-generation sequencing machine had single-handedly read the genetic code of an individual-one whose work had done so much to make the achievement possible.
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