Debate over the Human Genome Project at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, James Watson

Interviewee: James Watson. James Watson talks about debate over the Human Genome Project at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

It was very divisive, a lot of people said no, it's just too big, too boring, the time hasn't come, if you use humans they'll never finish it and the project will be done with the sort of people you don't want to know, because they'll be doing it only for the money, not because it's an intellectual challenge. On the other hand there were, some of the older people, by older I say greater than, over fifty like myself, who said well, you know, we want to find out the nature of, really of a lot of genetic diseases and we're unlikely to find them unless we know the sequence of the human genome.

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