What was the March 1986 genome-planning workshop organized by Charles DeLisi and David Smith called?

The March 1986 genome-planning workshop organized by Charles DeLisi and David Smith was called the Santa Fe Workshop.

The meeting was organized through the Department of Energy’s Office of Health and Environmental Research. It gave federal officials and scientists a forum to discuss a coordinated effort to map and sequence the human genome, helping connect a scientific proposal with government planning and funding.

The Santa Fe meeting is sometimes mixed up with James Watson’s later workshop at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Cold Spring Harbor was another important venue in the early history of the project, but it was not the name of the March 1986 DeLisi-Smith workshop. Likewise, the Asilomar Conference concerned recombinant-DNA safety, while the Bermuda meetings were associated with later international data-sharing principles.

The workshop’s political importance grew when DeLisi outlined a broad plan to DOE officials. That process contributed to funding proposals, a 1988 budget line, and eventual congressional support for the Human Genome Project, which officially began in 1990.