James Wyngaarden on Mechanics of the HGP
  James Wyngaarden     Biography    
Recorded: 18 Aug 2003

Well, the genetics community supported it very strongly. One of their strong leaders was Victor McKusick from Johns Hopkins, for example, and a friend of mine for many years. I’ve been on many boards with him. I talked with him at some length about these things. And within the National Academy of Sciences, there was no strong position about it. But I realized that if we were to be involved in this, there were two things that we really had to do. One is we had to get a stronger body of supporters from the scientific community.

So I organized a meeting. It was held in Reston near the Dulles Airport. And we invited a lot of opinion leaders from the sciences there including Jim Watson and David Baltimore, I asked to chair it because I knew he was opposed to it. And I thought he should listen to it, all the presentations and then make up his mind. That was a two day meeting, and David Botstein was there, who is on the program here today, and many others. Charles Cantor was important in that. And as this was all laid out and the arguments discussed for doing it and how to begin; what was the most important first thing to do and so on. It became clear to Baltimore and others that this wasn’t going to be mindless sequencing. For example, the ones who were opposed to it were envisioning a system in which graduate students would get their PhD for sequencing the next ten thousand bases. And they thought inquiry was going to be replaced by mindless, mechanical sequencing from Well, the genetics community supported it very strongly. One of their strong leaders was Victor McKusick from Johns Hopkins, for example, and a friend of mine for many years. I’ve been on many boards with him. I talked with him at some length about these things. And within the National Academy of Sciences, there was no strong position about it. But I realized that if we were to be involved in this, there were two things that we really had to do. One is we had to get a stronger body of supporters from the scientific community.

So I organized a meeting. It was held in Reston near the Dulles Airport. And we invited a lot of opinion leaders from the sciences there including Jim Watson and David Baltimore, I asked to chair it because I knew he was opposed to it. And I thought he should listen to it, all the presentations and then make up his mind. That was a two day meeting, and David Botstein was there, who is on the program here today, and many others. Charles Cantor was important in that. And as this was all laid out and the arguments discussed for doing it and how to begin; what was the most important first thing to do and so on. It became clear to Baltimore and others that this wasn’t going to be mindless sequencing. For example, the ones who were opposed to it were envisioning a system in which graduate students would get their PhD for sequencing the next ten thousand bases. And they thought inquiry was going to be replaced by mindless, mechanical sequencing from a series of steps, and conditions and so on. But it was a very strong report, so now we had both a scientific community report, and we had a sort of scientific administrative report if you will, from the most authoritative body in the land, the National Academy of Sciences. And so with that I now asked Congress for funds. And it just happened, I shouldn’t say just happened, it was deliberate that we scheduled two meetings before the next budget cycle for the NIH budget. And I knew that at the end of the budget hearing the chairman of the budget committee would ask me if I had or if they gave us a certain additional amount of money, what were my priorities for how this might be spent.

James B. Wyngaarden is a medical doctor, biochemist and medical science advisor. He served as director of the National Institutes of Health, associate director for Life Sciences in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Executive Office of the President, and as director of the Human Genome Organization. Wyngaarden is currently part of the Washington Advisory Group, LLC and director of four biotechnology/pharmaceutical companies. Wyngaarden is also co-author of the textbook The Metabolic Basis of Inherited Disease.

He researches the regulation of purine biosynthesis, the production of uric acid and he helped initiate the use of allopurinol, a drug developed as an anticancer agent and now used as a treatment for gout. While serving as director of the National Institutes of Heath, he enlisted the help of Dr. Watson in 1988 to begin the Human Genome Project. Jim obliged and joined the NIH as the associate director for Human Genome Research, while still acting as director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.