A working draft of the human genome was announced in 2000. On June 26 that year, U.S. President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair jointly announced the milestone alongside scientists from the public Human Genome Project and the private Celera Genomics effort.
The announcement represented the first broadly available rough assembly of human DNA, but it was not a finished sequence. Large sections were incomplete, and many fragments had not yet been placed with complete certainty. Scientific papers describing the two competing draft assemblies appeared in February 2001.
The project continued improving the sequence after the announcement. The Human Genome Project was declared complete in April 2003, although difficult repetitive regions remained unresolved for many years. A much more complete gapless human genome sequence was not reported until the Telomere-to-Telomere consortium’s work in 2022, with the Y chromosome completed separately in 2023.