The end of their 2-year journey marked the beginning of a century of expansion and growth for this new nation.
Biology is now at a similar juncture, marking both an ending and a new beginning.
This issue of Science signals the end of an 8-year effort to sequence the first animal genome, with the publication of the virtually complete sequence of the 97 million bases in the genome of a tiny nematode worm, Caenorhabditis elegans . But this milestone is also the beginning of a new era in biology. For one, the worm-sequencing effort has helped pave the way for sequencing the 3 billion bases that make up the human genome, a project that will extend into the next century. And now, the two groups who sequenced the worm genome, located at the Washington University Genome Sequencing Center in St. Louis and the Sanger Centre in Cambridge, U.K., expect to use the skills they've acquired to generate about half the human genome. As a result, says Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, countless other life scientists in addition to the 1200 or so who call themselves worm biologists will be tapping the nematode sequence for their studies.