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On June 14, 2013, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. opened the high-tech, high-intensity exhibition Genome: Unlocking Life's Code to celebrate the 10th anniversary of researchers producing the first complete human genome sequence - the genetic blueprint of the human body - in April 2003. The exhibition is a collaboration between the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) and the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) of the National Institutes of Health.

More than 400 scientists, bioethicists, and historians from 20 countries on 6 continents have gathered this week in Washington, DC, for the Human Gene Editing Summit. The attendees are a veritable who's who of genome editing: Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, Emmanuelle Charpentier of Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, and Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard-the three discoverers of the CRISPR-Cas9 system's utility in gene editing-plus dozens of other big names in genome science. Cal Tech's David Baltimore along with the heads of the four national societies hosting the meeting (US National Academy of Sciences, US National Academy of Medicine, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the U.K.'s Royal Society) provided opening remarks on Tuesday (December 1). And as I sat stage right in the NAS auditorium, I noticed the unmistakable rear profile of Harvard Medical School's George Church three rows in front of me. Church was scheduled to speak at a session later that afternoon about the application of CRISPR and other new precision gene editing techniques to the human germline-a hot-button topic since April, when a Chinese group published it had successfully modified the genomes of human embryos, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) said it would not fund such research. Then in September, the U.S./U.K.-based Hinxton Group, an international consortium of scientists, policy experts, and bioethicists, said it supported the use of genetic editing in human embryos for limited applications in research and medicine.  

The Human Genome Project (HGP) was one of the great feats of exploration in history - an inward voyage of discovery rather than an outward exploration of the planet or the cosmos; an international research effort to sequence and map all of the genes - together known as the genome - of members of our species, Homo sapiens. Completed in April 2003, the HGP gave us the ability, for the first time, to read nature's complete genetic blueprint for building a human being.

A dynamic 3D computer animated video takes you "inside" for a close-up look at how we're made. Watch as the mysteries of the Human Genome are literally "unraveled." 3D modeling and animation created by Bill Baker, Bakedmedia, Inc. and Mike Fisher for the National Human Genome Research Institute.

Educational materials about genetics and genomics

Epigenomic fact sheet

Q/A format comprehensive fact sheet at student accessible reading level.