The Human Genome Project officially began in 1990.
The project was an international effort to map and sequence the roughly 3 billion DNA base pairs in the human genome. In the United States, the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy coordinated major parts of the work, alongside research teams in countries including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, and China.
Planning began before the official launch. A National Academy of Sciences committee outlined major goals in 1988, and the NIH created an Office for Human Genome Research that same year. On October 1, 1990, the project formally started with an initial five-year plan and an expected 15-year schedule.
The first working draft was announced in 2000, and a draft sequence was published in 2001. The project was declared complete in April 2003, ahead of schedule. Finishing the sequence did not mean scientists understood every gene or disease; it created a reference map that enabled modern genomics, large-scale DNA comparison, and many later studies of human variation and health.