The 1985 workshop organized by Robert Sinsheimer on sequencing a reference genome was hosted by the University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz).
Sinsheimer, a molecular biologist and then UC Santa Cruz chancellor, convened the meeting in May 1985 to examine whether emerging DNA-sequencing technologies could make a systematic human reference genome feasible. The gathering helped move whole-genome sequencing from an ambitious idea toward a serious policy and scientific discussion.
UC Santa Cruz later became important to the project for another reason: its Genome Bioinformatics Group, led by Jim Kent and David Haussler, assembled the first publicly available rough draft of the human genome sequence in 2000. That later achievement can cause confusion, but the question asks about Sinsheimer’s earlier workshop, not the later genome-browser work.
The workshop was one of several independent origins for the Human Genome Project. Renato Dulbecco advanced the idea in a 1986 Science essay, while Charles DeLisi and David Smith organized the federally supported Santa Fe Workshop the following year.