Well, I’m basically an internationalist by experience. You know, I first spent a summer abroad at the age of 16. And I think it’s—I’m fascinated by all the differences and enjoy seeing that. And you know nations are artifice, we’re all people. We have different ancestors and so forth but basically we’re all people and as such we share basically the same kind of phenotype. And so, you know, you should work with—and science is wonderful at this. You know, you work on problems with whoever you share ideas with and the collaboration with John even though we were four thousand miles apart couldn’t have been closer. And I think it actually benefited by having our different viewpoints and stuff.

On a deeper level I think that it was very important to have the rest of the world involved in that this was not a U.S.-only project. It was U.S.-centric enough to make the rest of the world uncomfortable. Because this is powerful information. If the U.S. were to be seen as the sole repository and if it had been a U.S. company as the sole repository I think it would have engendered very substantial problems.

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.