Richard Gibbs on Getting Started
  Richard Gibbs     Biography    
Recorded: 14 May 2004

Well, we thought hard about what some of the fundamental molecular biology requirements were for the project. We thought about how some of these random shotgun libraries had to be made. How some of these large insert clones had to be handled. So we put a lot of our energy into these processes that were to do with doing that efficiently. That plus working these sequencing machines, these fluorescent-sequencing machines, we take for granted now. In the beginning they were pretty crude. They were very manual devices. We spent time to figure out how to optimize that technology.

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.