But researchers can give some tantalizing information about their sources. And in the case of Celera, researchers will not rule out the possibility that one sample was homegrown. About 70 percent of the sequence used for the public Human Genome Project came from one donor, a man known only as RPCI-11, according to the project director, Dr. Francis Collins. The donor was one of about 100 people from diverse backgrounds who answered a 1997 call for genome volunteers in a Buffalo newspaper. But don't expect to find the man whose DNA has been copied, tweaked and analyzed in labs all over the world.
Research ethics dictate that participants in virtually all studies are guaranteed anonymity.
That principle was of unparalleled importance in the genome project, because the presence of genes linked with diseases might mark donors for discrimination by employers or insurance companies. So the public genome group took the unusual step of destroying all records of how samples were labeled, leaving no link between donors and their genes. Even the donors don't know who was used, the team said. The lab at Washington University in St. Louis that did much of the early sequence work used a technique tailored to sequencing just one person. The proportion of DNA from RPCI-11 should fall as scientists add more samples to fill in gaps in the current genome databases.