Robert H. Waterston

Through his leadership of the project to sequence the genome of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, Waterston established methods and strategies that brought whole-genome sequencing of metazoans to reality. His laboratory extended these to the human genome, constructing a clone-based physical map that served as the framework for the public Human Genome Project and producing more of the finished human reference sequence than any other US laboratory.

His leadership in the HGP was essential in fostering and maintaining the international collaboration. Waterston also led projects to define both what is evolutionarily conserved between mouse and human genomes and what has changed between chimpanzee and human genomes. His laboratory provided the largest collection of publicly available Expressed Sequence Tags for both human and mouse and contributed to the initial human SNP map.

Through Waterston's efforts all of this sequence is in the public domain without restriction, where it continues to foster discovery and medical advance.