Richard Gibbs on Human Genome Project
  Richard Gibbs     Biography    
Recorded: 14 May 2004

Well, that things got a lot warmer after about 1996. There was this period between 1990 and 1995 when most of the community was working on mapping and these other peripheral issues. And ____my group was working on sequencing and sequencing technology because we figured that this was the core issue and that sooner or later this had to come into play. Now it didn’t come into play quite how I thought it would. It was much more forgotten and then more sudden then I would have predicted. But in those early days there was a lot of YAC maps and radiation hybrid maps and a lot of stuff that turned out to be not very useful in the end, but just took up a lot of time and resources in the beginning.

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.