Which UK charity helped fund the Human Genome Project?

The Wellcome Trust helped fund the Human Genome Project.

The UK-based charitable foundation was one of the project’s most important non-U.S. supporters. Its funding established and supported the Sanger Centre—now the Wellcome Sanger Institute—in Cambridgeshire. The institute became a major sequencing centre and made the largest single contribution by any centre to the reference sequence produced by the public project.

The Human Genome Project was an international collaboration, not a programme financed by one organisation alone. In the United States, the National Institutes of Health and Department of Energy were the principal public funders. Laboratories in countries including the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Germany and China also contributed expertise and resources.

The Wellcome Trust is sometimes confused with the Wellcome Sanger Institute. The Trust is the funding charity; the Sanger Institute is the research organisation it established and supported. The Rockefeller, Ford and Gates foundations have funded major scientific or public-health work, but they are not the UK charity identified with HGP funding.