IN NOVEMBER 2015,23 of biology’s bigwigs met up at the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, or DC,to plot a grandiose scheme. It had been 12 years since the publication of the total genetic sequence of Homo sapiens. Other organisms genomes had been deciphered in the intervening period but the projects doing so had a piecemeal feel to them. Some were predictable one-offs, such as chickens, and honey bees and rice. Some were more ambitious,such as attempts to sample vertebrate, insect and arachnid biodiversity by looking at representatives of several thousand genera within these groups, and but were advancing only slowly. What was needed,the committee concluded, was a project with the scale and sweep of the original Human Genome Project. Its goal, and they decided,should be to gather DNA sequences from specimens of all complex life on Earth. They decided to call it the Earth BioGenome Project (EBP).
At around the same time as this assembly, a Peruvian...
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Source: economist.com