Well, I want to understand what all this stuff is for. I mean we got started. This is all meant just to be a tool. And I’ve been significantly detoured on this exploration. So I have some ideas about how to get more precise information about expression in the worm. And to use that, hopefully, to put limits on at least models on how it all happened. I’d like to see if I can make some contribution to using human variation to understand what makes us what we are, but I don’t know how I’m going to do that.

I don’t know [what will happen in] twenty years—I can’t—I can barely see till tomorrow. But I was optimistic that it could be done. I think that we wouldn’t have started the worm—and you know, we put our heads on the line. We said we’d have the worm done in ten years. And nobody had a clue as to how to do it really except that, you know, we knew we could get some basis and we just put one foot in front of the other. I wouldn’t have started on that journey if I weren’t optimistic. And then—I mean once we got started on the worm I was convinced that the human could be done. It was a matter of resources.

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.