That is the wonder of the world though. I mean you don’t have to—you don’t have to not understand it to be awed by it. I mean it’s just amazing to—and, you know, I talk a little bit about this at the press conference when it was announced. It’s just to—you know we don’t begin to understand what’s going on but to have the sense that we have in front of us now. The complete information is just astounding that this—these three building bases most of which are not used for anything so now we’re down to three hundred million or a hundred and fifty million. That these contain all the information that it takes to make something as complex as a person is just astounding. It is an amazing thing. We don’t have to lose our wonder jut because we try to understand it.

Dr. Robert Waterston is a biologist best known for his involvement in the Human Genome Project. He has also served as chairman of the NIH’s Molecular Cytology Study Section and as a member of the NIH Advisory Council. He carried out his undergraduate work at Princeton University in 1965 and received both his MD and PhD degrees from the University of Chicago in 1972. His post-doctoral work was completed at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge.

In 1965, Dr. Waterston received his bachelor's degree in engineering from Princeton University. In 1972, he received an M.D. and a PhD in pathology from the University of Chicago. After his post-doctoral fellowship at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, he joined the Washington University faculty in 1976 where he is currently the James S. McDonnel Professor of Genetics, head of the Department of Genetics, and director of the School of Medicine’s Genome Sequencing Center, which he founded in 1993. In 2003, Dr. Waterston took on the role of Chair of the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington.

In 1989, Dr. Waterston and John Sulston received one of the first grants for the Human Genome Project to sequence the nematode worm genome. His project saw so much success that Dr. Waterston received funding from the National Human Genome Research Institute to carry out sequencing of the human genome at his laboratory. Dr. Waterston and Sulston became the first to completely sequence the genome of an animal, publishing the nematode worm sequence in 1998.

Dr. Waterston has received awards and recognition for his work including the Genetics Society of America’s Beadle Award in 2000, the International Gairdner Award in 2002, the Dan David Prize in 2002, the Alfred P. Sloan Award from the GM Cancer Research Foundation in 2002, and the Gruber Prize in Genetics in 2005.