Interviewee: Francis Collins. Francis Collins, the director of the public project, talks about the media attention, and what it missed during the "race" coverage. (DNAi Location: Genome > The project > Players > Competition and the media > Media: a two-edged sword)

Well I think all the media attention to the Genome Project was sort of a two-edged sword. It was a good thing because it brought public attention to a project that really hadn't received a lot of recognition and yet which had the potential to change the world, and will change the world, and yet most people until '99 or so hadn't really heard of it, didn't have a sense what was happening or why it mattered. Now all of a sudden there's a story every week, usually a story about the race to sequence the human genome. The down side of it was the stories in general, although there were exceptions, didn't do a very good job of explaining the science, didn't really convey the historic nature of this, didn't really convey the medical significance or the societal significance.

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