Richard Gibbs on International HapMap Project
  Richard Gibbs     Biography    
Recorded: 14 May 2004

So the project? Yeah, so, great idea! So if we could we would sequence everybody. That’s probably their great dream if we could sequence everyone on the planet and somehow have access to all their health records without compromising their genetic integrity or their personal situations and analyze that data in relation to this sequence, and, of course, we can’t do that.

So, a shortcut to that [is] that we want to try and find the gene variation in them that is contributing to their phenotype. A shortcut to that, do the HapMap project, find out the overall genetic geography, the basic genetic architecture of these populations and use that as a background to do these specific genetic studies.

Richard A. Gibbs is currently the Director of the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) and the Wofford Cain Professor in the Department of Molecular and Human Genetics. He received a B.Sc. (Hons) in 1979 and a Ph.D. in Genetics and Radiation Biology in 1985 at the University of Melbourne in Australia. In 1990 he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Houston’s Baylor College of Medicine, studying the molecular basis of human X-linked diseases and developing technologies for rapid genetic analysis. He developed several fundamental technologies for nucleic acid analysis. In 1991, he joined the BCM faculty and played a key role in the early planning and development phases of the Human Genome Project. In 1996, he established the BCM Human Genome Sequencing Center when Baylor was chosen as one of six programs to complete the final phase of the Human Genome Project. Dr. Gibbs has also made significant contributions to the deciphering of the fly, mouse, dictyostelium, and rat genomes. Among the numerous awards and honors received by Dr. Gibbs, he was awarded the Michael E. DeBakey, M.D., Excellence in Research Award in 2000.